Around the World in Half an Hour

A Nobel Prize-winning economist once said there were four kinds of countries: the developed, the underdeveloped, Japan, and Argentina. He meant it as a puzzle — how does a country with some of the finest farmland on Earth, the world's greatest beef culture, and a population that produces Borges and Messi and Piazzolla keep finding new ways to make itself poorer? Argentina is the eighth-largest...

There is a beach in Barbuda called Princess Diana Beach. It is pink-tinged, quiet, and so beautiful that Diana called it the finest she had ever seen — three months before she died. In 2017, Hurricane Irma destroyed 95 percent of Barbuda's structures. The beach survived. The island had to be rebuilt. This is Antigua and Barbuda. Two islands. 442 square kilometres. A population of 98,000. And a...

More enslaved Africans left Angola's shores than from any other territory on the continent. An estimated five to six million people, shipped to Brazil, the Caribbean, and North America over three centuries. The rhythms they carried — Semba — became Samba in Brazil. And Kizomba, born in Luanda's streets during the civil war years, is now danced in studios in Paris, Tokyo, and Buenos Aires....

It has no airport, no army, and no coastline. It is ruled by two princes, neither of whom is Andorran, neither of whom has ever lived there. And it has survived, unbroken, since 1278 — through the Hundred Years' War, the Napoleonic Wars, the Spanish Civil War, and two World Wars raging on both sides of its border. Andorra is the last surviving example of a medieval co-principality, tucked into...

It is the largest country in Africa. More than four-fifths of it is the Sahara Desert. And painted on the walls of its ancient sandstone plateaus are the memories of a world ten thousand years gone — elephants and giraffes and the people who hunted them, preserved in the dry Saharan air long after the land turned to dust. Algeria is a country of staggering contrasts. A Mediterranean coastline of w...

It is one of the smallest countries in Europe. For 46 years, it was the most isolated nation on Earth. And it is one of the most beautiful, strangest, and least-known destinations on the continent. Albania sits on the western edge of the Balkans, facing Italy across a narrow strip of Adriatic Sea, with beaches that rival Greece, mountains that rival Switzerland, and a history layered with ancient...

We begin our alphabetical journey around the world with one of the oldest, most storied, and most misunderstood countries on the planet — Afghanistan. Long before the headlines, there was a civilisation. A land where lapis lazuli was mined and traded to the pharaohs of Egypt. Where Alexander the Great fought the hardest campaign of his military career and fell so deeply under the country's spe...

Every great journey needs a starting point. This is ours. Before Ray takes you to the first of 195 countries, he sits down to tell you everything — what Around the World in Half an Hour really is, how it works, why it exists, and what you can expect every single Monday at 7pm when a new episode lands. This is a show about the whole world. Not just the famous countries, not just the ones that make...