24 - Europe's north-south divides

This map is yet another dissection of Europe, this time focussing on the north-south divides in the continent. Some of the boundaries here were already present in one or both of the earlier maps, especially the religious (Protestant-Catholic) and linguistic (Germanic-Romance) divides. Three additional borders are of a more climatic nature:

  • The northern limit of vineyards, winding its way from the north coast of Spain up via France, to reach its northernmost point  in the Belgian-German border area and thereafter undulating through Central Europe (almost perfectly following the southern border of the Czech Republic, Slovakia and the Ukraine).
  • Then, there’s a divide between plains and mountains: this line starts north of the Pyrennees, dips into the Mediterranean before heading straight north to take in the Alps, after which is crosses Bavaria and Austria. After this, the line falls between Poland and Slovakia before heading south through Romania, via the Transylvanian Alps.
  • Finally, there’s the divide between cool, wet and hot, dry climates, splitting Spain, skirting the South of France, the North of Italy, the Adriatic coast of the former Yugoslavia and the north of Greece.

One wonders, with global warming and all, whether the first and the third of these lines shouldn’t be moved northwards by now…

europedivides.JPG

blog comments powered by Disqus

Share This Story

About Strange Maps

568 Posts since 2006

Frank Jacobs loves maps, but finds most atlases too predictable. He collects and comments on all kinds of intriguing maps—real, fictional, and what-if ones—and has been writing the Strange Maps blog since 2006, first on WordPress and now for Big Think.  His map "US States Renamed For Countries With Similar GDPs" has been viewed more than 587,000 times. An anthology of maps from this blog was published by Penguin in 2009 and can be purchased from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

 

SUBMIT A STRANGE MAP!

Frank can be reached at strangemaps@gmail.com.

Recent Posts