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A landlocked Sea is a sea that is either not at all or not directly connected to the Ocean s. The Caspian Sea and the Aral Sea are sometimes considered to be Lake s. If that is taken to be true, 44 percent of the total amount of water in the world's lakes forms the Caspian Sea. A sea that is almost landlocked is connected to the oceans by a Strait only, such as the Baltic Sea , the Mediterranean Sea , and the Black Sea . This may be of strategic importance, with one or two countries controlling the entrance, and/or be relevant for Tide s and Freshwater content. SIGNIFICANCE OF A COUNTRY BEING LANDLOCKED Historically, being landlocked was regarded as a disadvantageous position. It cuts the country off from sea resources such as Fishing , but more importantly cuts off access to seaborne Trade which even today makes up a large percentage of international trade. Around the world, coastal regions tend to be wealthier and more heavily populated than inland ones. Countries thus have made particular efforts to avoid being landlocked. The International Congo Society , which owned the modern-day Democratic Republic Of The Congo , was given a thin piece of land bisecting Angola to connect it to the sea by the Conference Of Berlin in 1885 . The Dubrovnik Republic had once gifted the town of Neum to the Ottoman Empire because it did not want to have a land border with Venice; this small municipality was inherited by Bosnia And Herzegovina for which it now provides limited sea access, splitting the Croatia n part of the Adriatic coast in two. After WWI Poland was given the Danzig Corridor to give it an outlet on the sea. The Danube was internationalized so that landlocked Austria and Hungary could have secure access to the sea. Losing access to the sea is often a great blow to nations. The successful separatist movement in had a constitutional Autonomy within Hungary , the City of Fiume was independent, governed directly as a ''corpus separatum'' from Budapest by an appointed governor, as Hungary 's only international port between 1779-1813, 1822-1848 and 1868-1918. The . Some countries may have a large coastline, but no readily usable one. For instance Russia 's only ports were on the Arctic Ocean and frozen shut much of the year. Gaining control of a Warm Water Port was a major motivator of Russian expansion towards the Baltic Sea , Black Sea and Pacific Ocean . Similarly, several countries have coastlines on landlocked Sea s such as the Caspian and the Aral . Since these seas are sometimes considered to be Lake s, and since they do not allow access to seaborne trade, countries such as Kazakhstan are still considered to be landlocked. An Island Nation , a country completely surrounded by water, is the opposite of a landlocked one. LANDLOCKED COUNTRIES
DOUBLY LANDLOCKED COUNTRIES A landlocked country which is surrounded entirely by other landlocked countries may be called a "doubly landlocked" country. A person in such a country would have to cross at least two borders to reach a coastline. There are only two such countries in the world:
However, their landlocked neighbours do have indirect access to the sea, via the Danube river in Liechtenstein's case and via canals from the landlocked but non-freshwater Caspian Sea in the case of Uzbekistan. SEMI-LANDLOCKED COUNTRIES The following countries are almost landlocked, and their short coastlines measure only a tiny fraction of the length of their land Border s. The list below gives the countries where this fraction is less than 5%:
CORRIDORS A landlocked country may be given access to the sea through a Corridor , such as the Polish corridor giving this post-WWI country access to the Baltic Sea. However, one country's corridor may split another country into Exclave s, such as East Prussia separated from Germany proper by the same Polish Corridor. The same is true of the sea corridor of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The lack of a land corridor joining Germany to East Prussia was a pretext for starting WWII . Bolivia Lost Its Corridor to the sea after the War Of The Pacific . RAILWAY MISSING LINKS While the railway systems of Europe and North America all interconnect albeit sometimes with incompatible gauges, etc, Africa, South and Central America, Asia and the Middle East generally do not connect very well. This might be called "rail-locked". Kathmandu , for instance, the capital of landlocked Nepal , does not have any railway connection. SEE ALSO
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