Couto Misto

Couto Misto, the Mixed Borough, was an independent microstate on the border between Spain and Portugal, in the Salas valley of Ourense in Galicia. It held the villages of Santiago de Rubias, Rubias and Meaus, with a small uninhabited strip that now lies in the Portuguese municipality of Montalegre. The name tells its story: couto, from the Latin for a boundary stone, marked a territory that medieval manorial relations had left outside both crowns, and for centuries it ran itself as a sovereign country in miniature. Its inhabitants paid no taxes and served in no army, and the little state could grant asylum to fugitives and refuse entry to any foreign troops. The anomaly lasted until modern cartography caught up with it: the Treaty of Lisbon of 1864 drew the line through the valley, giving most of the land with the three villages to Spain and the empty strip to Portugal.