🇬🇧Facts about United Kingdom, for your next trip

The United Kingdom is a union of four nations, England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, sharing one parliament in London while keeping separate legal systems and, in three cases, their own devolved governments. It industrialised first, built the largest empire in history and still exerts outsized influence through its language, finance and universities.

The state covers the island of Great Britain plus the northeastern corner of Ireland, and nowhere in the country sits more than about 125 kilometers from the sea. The land tilts from the highlands of Scotland and Wales in the north and west toward the low, fertile ground of southeast England, and the Gulf Stream keeps the whole of it milder and damper than the latitude would suggest.

London holds around nine million people and functions as capital, financial center and cultural hub at once, on a scale nothing else in the country matches. Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds and Glasgow anchor their own regions, Edinburgh holds the Scottish parliament and the festival, Cardiff and Belfast the Welsh and Northern Irish administrations. Visitors mostly split between London, the historic university cities of Oxford, Cambridge, York and Bath, and the landscapes further out: the Scottish Highlands, the Lake District, Snowdonia and the Cornish coast.