What is in it?
Andorra is a town with a dozen smaller villages around, the size of a Spanish shire at best.
It has never been rich until tax evasion and tourism came in, its main economic activity were shepards and cheap metal mining. It is trapped in the Pyrenees, surrounded by mountains on all sides, with no access to the sea, deep inland and with no major road crossing it.
It has glacial climate with thick ice and year-round snow, like all big mountain ranges, all it has is tax-free stuff, laxe banking and big ski resorts. Nothing grows in it, it is very harsh to invade and conquer, and it was so small and poor that it was never a threat to no one.
Sure, it's Spain and France, they would have conquered it anyways. But precisely because it is BETWEEN Spain and France, it has always enjoyed the protection of one from the other. If Spain just decided to invade, France would defend it out of pride. And if France had decided to do it themselves, Spain would have defended them instead.
Salvador Dalí's Clock, a statue imitating the Spanish artist's iconic paintings of clocks as time
The only way for Andorra to be annexed is by mutual agreement… and that is exactly what it is. Andorra is actually the Principality of Andorra, a BIARCHY, like Ancient Sparta, with one French and one Spanish prince. The Spanish one is the Bishop of Urgel, and the French one is the Count of Foix.
The thing is the County of Foix was attached to the Bourbons, and thus absorbed by the King of France when the latter replaced the Valois on the throne. On top of that, the surviving titles of the King of France that still serve for public office were passed to the President of the French Republic—the Revolution invented lots of Law.
Emmanuel Macron, by the right of the Republic also the Count of Foix, straight from Louis XVI; and the Count of Foix is the Prince of Andorra
Ironically, by agnatic right, as the surviving head of the House of Bourbon, the King of Spain should hold that title instead of the President of France.
Thus following plain rules of inheritance BOTH princes would have become Spanish when the French killed their Bourbons. Following political balance though, we get what we have now: a French president and a Spanish bishop on thrones.
Andorra la Vella, the capital “Andorra the Old”
Similarly, while the language of Andorra is Catalan (it was historically a county in the Spanish March of the Franks), the most spoken is Spanish, followed then by Catalan, and lastly by French. Thus Andorra is also rather unique in being a trilingual society, although here imbalanced, with two Spanish languages (Spanish and Catalan) FAR more spoken, and some French.
Andorra has a trilingual school system as well, parents must choose between three school paths, and children attend classes in the language of the path chosen:
▪︎Catalan school (Escola Escaldes-Engordany)
▪︎Spanish school (Colegio María Moliner)
▪︎French school (Lycée Comte de Foix)
Colegio María Moliner, Spanish School in Andorra, the main centre for the Spanish language path… above two guys learning how to knit
Historically the most chosen was the Spanish school, almost twice as much as the French until the 2000s, with the Catalan school very small. But since the early 2000s the Andorran government has made big efforts to have parents choose the Catalan one (largely among Spanish speaking families, the French keep choosing French).
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