Europe Facts

0.3% of solar energy from the Sahara is enough to power the whole of Europe.

It was once against the law to slam your car door in a city in Switzerland!

In parts of Albania and Bulgaria, particularly among older generations, a side-to-side head shake means 'yes' while an upward head tilt means 'no' — the opposite of most countries.

Nearly 60 million Christmas trees are grown each year in Europe.

Europe is the only continent without a hot desert.

For 4,000 years after they started making cheese, Ancient Europeans were lactose intolerant.

2% of Europeans lack the genes for smelly armpits.

There are more people living in London (8.3m) than the whole of Denmark (5.6m).

Chocolate was once considered medicine, prescribed by European doctors to treat angina and depression as late as the 19th century.

Latvia has the largest gender imbalance in Europe. Women outnumber men by over 130,000 — in a country of just 1.86 million people.

In Portugal, it's illegal for your employer to contact you outside of working hours — companies face fines of nearly €10,000 per violation.

Medieval courts put animals on trial for real. A sow in Falaise, France was dressed in a jacket and breeches in 1386 and hanged in the market square for attacking a child. Rats, weevils, and beetles got court-appointed lawyers. One French jurist, Bartholomew Chassenée, built his whole career defending rodents.

About two million people held hands across three countries on August 23, 1989. Their chain stretched 419 miles, from Tallinn through Riga to Vilnius. It is still the longest human chain ever to link multiple countries. They had no cell phones, only radios and buses to stay in sync. Within two years, all three nations broke free from Soviet rule.