The Patch of Desert No Country Will Take

Bir Tawil sits on the Egypt-Sudan border, 2,060 square kilometers of rock and sand with no permanent residents and no coastline. It is, as far as governments are concerned, the only piece of habitable land on Earth that nobody owns. Both neighbors actively refuse it.

The refusal is not about Bir Tawil. It is about the Hala'ib Triangle, a much larger and more useful strip of land just to the northeast, on the Red Sea coast. Two British-drawn boundaries from the turn of the last century put Hala'ib and Bir Tawil on opposite sides of opposite lines. The 1899 agreement set Sudan's border at the 22nd parallel; the 1902 administrative boundary redrew the line to follow tribal grazing patterns. Egypt insists the 1899 version is the real one; Sudan insists on the 1902 version.

The geometry of the disagreement is the catch. Whichever line you accept, Hala'ib goes to one country and Bir Tawil goes to the other. There is no version of the map where any single state gets both. Hala'ib has a coast, ports, and roughly 20,000 km2 of land. Bir Tawil has gold-mining camps and the Ababda and Bishari tribes passing through. Claim Bir Tawil and you have just admitted Hala'ib belongs to your neighbor.

So neither country claims it. In 2014, a Virginia father named Jeremiah Heaton flew to the area, planted a homemade flag, and declared his six-year-old daughter the Princess of North Sudan. Disney bought the film rights. The kingdom remains unrecognized; the desert remains unclaimed.