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Generally speaking, the capital, or capital city, can be defined as a city that is the seat of the administration and government of a «State». There is only one capital, and it has considerable political and symbolic importance on the scale of the national «territory» to which it belongs. However capital cities do not necessarily dominate large global urban networks, and their role is increasingly challenged, as indeed is that of the States that they represent. Yet capital cities have never (...)

Straits are narrow stretches of water between two land masses joining two marine expanses. A strait (or also the plural, straits) can connect two oceans (the Torres Straits, the Straits of Malacca), an ocean to a sea (the Straits of Gibraltar), two «continents» (the straits of Gibraltar, the Bosphorus, or the Behring Straits), an island and a continent (Straits of Malacca, Formosa Straits, Dover Straits), or two islands (Bonifacio Straits and the straits in the Philippines and Indonesia). (...)

The relief of a region can be defined, as a first approximation, as the different forms, or the salient and hollow volumes that make it up - "a family of topographical forms" in the phrase of De Martonne. However, while relief is a geographical object that has been widely studied, analysed and interpreted by generations of specialists, explorers and geographers, it has not often been precisely "defined". This is probably because the notion of relief includes one of the most obvious (...)