Dwarf States - special country points

Geocaching and the dwarf states

According to Wikipedia, dwarf states, dwarf states or better microstates of this world are "sovereign states with a fixed land mass of no more than about 1000 square kilometers (excluding maritime sovereignty)".

Dwarf States - where are they again?

Country point dwarf states

Even if we are officially talking about dwarf states, the term dwarf states has become established during cacher trips. Not because we think only dwarves live here, but because it's a nice term that has proven itself over a number of trips and is used.

Of the 27 smallest countries in the world, as listed on Wikipedia, six are in Europe, all south of Germany. Not included are Gibraltar and Isle of Man, which are listed as separate countries on Geocaching.com and could also be considered dwarf states in terms of size. All this information is interesting for geocachers, as the dwarf states often give a fast country point - or not...

If you are visiting a neighboring country or are passing through, then the country point is very close, you can quickly scurry across the border in Europe and usually find a cache close to the border.

On the other hand, a small country can also be difficult to reach because they are not served by major airlines or do not have a continuous highway route…. Anyone who tried to get from Toulouse to Andorra in January knows what we are talking about here. And even when the time of year is good, you can't get a quick, cheap return flight to San Marino. It's hardly possible without an arduous car journey - or with Cacher-Reisen in a comfortable coach to the smallest countries in the world.

Travel planning

But if you – like us from Cacher-Reisen – would like to travel and cache all countries in the world and first of all all of Europe, you can’t avoid the dwarf states.

So we set about planning a trip on how to collect these country points in a group over a weekend. However, since not only the country point should be content of the trip, but also sightseeing and one or the other cache should be on the program, it quickly became clear that no more than two of the scattered countries could be visited here. But the year has a lot of weekends and so the idea came up to visit the dwarf states bit by bit.

Dwarf States IN: Vatican City and San Marino

Since we are sometimes impatient and just love traveling too much to be able to wait here for a long time, we spontaneously chose the last (long) weekend in May. From May 31st to June 3rd it will be from Munich via Austria to Italy. Content of our trip and first stop is Rome and of course the Vatican City. The aim is of course to cache the Vatican City empty, which would be 9 caches according to the current status. An event will certainly also be part of our Rome Day.

The following day, our coach takes us comfortably from the 4-star hotel to the state of San Marino. The route is not far and so there is still some time left in the day to stroll extensively in San Marino, to cache and also to see something. There are currently almost 30 caches in San Marino, but they are also very scattered. Evening brings us the bus to our hotel on the Italian side from where we will start our way home on Sunday. A long weekend and 4 possible country points. Even those who have already ticked off some of them will certainly find new caches to discover.

Dwarf States – San Marino

Dwarf States II: Liechtenstein and Monaco

But that should not be enough. We have two more microstates on the agenda for the end of this year. From November 23rd to 25th it should go to Monaco.

We chose Ulm as the starting point, which is easily accessible by train and car. From there we take the bus again via Switzerland and of course via Liechtenstein to France. We have Saturday for caching, strolling, casino, café by the sea, etc. all in Monaco. Here we have currently counted just over 30 caches.

Dwarf States – Monaco

Planning dwarf states

This year Cacher-Reisen is offering visits to 4 mini-states. Anyone who is interested in Gibraltar may have noticed that we already had a weekend trip there this year and experienced a lot. We will also repeat the Morocco-Gibraltar tour next year. And of course we are also considering including the Isle of Man and Andorra in the travel program. So that at the end of 2019 we can say that we have visited all the mini-states in Europe. But now let’s start with Vatican City and San Marino – and anyone who has been there knows that Rome is always worth a visit!