Andorra document photos online

For ten summer days in 1934, Andorra had a king. A Russian-born adventurer and swindler named Boris Skossyreff talked his way before the General Council of the Valleys, drafted his own constitution, crowned himself Boris I, and promised casinos and tax-free banking, until the bishop's police arrested him and shipped him across the border. It is a fittingly strange episode for a country with no army, no national currency of its own, and two heads of state, one of them the President of France, who has never been elected by a single Andorran voter.

• Two princes Andorra is ruled by two co-princes who never set foot there to govern, the Catholic Bishop of Urgell in Spain and the President of France, an arrangement frozen in place by a treaty signed in 1278.
• Passport power The Andorran passport ranks 14th worldwide on the Henley Passport Index, opening 169 destinations visa-free despite belonging to a country smaller than New York City.
• No own money Andorra uses the euro as its official currency yet sits outside the EU, gaining the right to mint its own euro coins only through a 2011 monetary agreement signed with Brussels.
• Phantom currency Andorra's traditional unit, the diner, has been struck since 1977 purely as collector coins, you cannot buy anything with it, open an account in it, or exchange it at any bank.
• Two postal systems The country has no postal service of its own, so France's La Poste and Spain's Correos both deliver mail, each issuing separate Andorra-only stamps that the other nation refuses to process.
• Mail for free A quirk of that dual postal setup is that letters posted within Andorra travel domestically free of charge, a privilege almost no other nation grants its residents.
• Selective citizenship Roughly only a third of Andorra's residents hold Andorran nationality, with Spanish passport-holders actually outnumbering native citizens, the legacy of one of Europe's most restrictive naturalisation regimes.
• Highest capital Andorra la Vella sits at about 1,023 metres in the Pyrenees, making it the highest capital city in Europe, reachable by neither train nor plane.
• Crowned founder Andorrans trace their statehood to Charlemagne, who is said to have freed the valleys in 803, and their national anthem opens by addressing him directly as 'Great Charlemagne, my father.'