Marcus Kane

A landlocked country where ruined fortresses crown almost every hilltop, the Tatras rise out of nowhere, and the capital touches two other countries from one bench.

A tiny island at the tip of the Malay Peninsula that went from swampland to global hub in sixty years. Singapore breaks more rules than it follows.

A small West African country with a name borrowed from a Portuguese sailor, a coastline most people have never heard of, and a story worth telling.

Seychelles is the only country in the world built on mid-ocean granite. The islands look like nowhere else, and the population would fit inside a college football stadium.

Serbia sits at a crossroads where empires kept colliding. The food is heavy, the music is louder, and the history goes back further than most countries can claim.

Senegal anchors West Africa's Atlantic coast with pink lakes, the world's westernmost point on the mainland, and a hospitality code that locals call teranga.

Saudi Arabia covers most of the Arabian Peninsula with sand, mountains, and oil fields. It holds the two holiest cities in Islam and the largest continuous sand desert on the planet.

A two-island country smaller than Rhode Island, sitting right on the equator, with a colonial cocoa past and a forest most people will never see.

San Marino has been a republic since the year 301. That means it had been running itself for nearly fifteen centuries before the United States existed.

Samoa once erased an entire Friday from its calendar. That story tells you almost everything you need to know about how this country works.

Saint Vincent and the Grenadines is a chain of 32 islands in the eastern Caribbean. Only nine are inhabited, and one of them is still erupting.

Saint Lucia is a small Caribbean island with twin volcanic spires, a drive-in volcano, and more Nobel Prize winners per capita than any country on Earth.