Offhand the closest two distinct national capitals I can think of are Kinshasa (Democratic Republic of the Congo, formerly known as Zaire) and Brazzaville (Republic of the Congo), which are located opposite each other on the banks of the Congo river. While the river has some breadth I expect the townships border each other. If you want to split hairs you could measure the distance from the capital building of each to get a distance.
So... anyway for the sake of this exercise... what are smallest distance between three national capitals? To define this we'll imagine a triangle connecting the three and take its... perimeter. I put it this way so if by some miracle three capitals are in a perfect line we don't get someone trying to say that triangle has zero area. Just add the distance from capital A to capital B, then B to C, then C back to A. That is your combined distance.
As part of this exercise we can repeat this with four capitals.. and five.. and so on.
But let's just focus on the 3, 4 and 5 for now. Some of them might be the same. I would imagine we'd be looking at smaller nations here, perhaps in carribean isles. I have not looked this up yet, am just posting it then hopefully will answer later. Since I'm getting almost no responses to things here I'll cross-post this in e-sam and maybe copy some of the replies back to here.
A national capital must be the national capital of a generally recognized independent nation (i.e., no using Nicosa as capital of both Cyprus and Northwest Cyprus as only Turkey recognizes the latter). "Micronations" do not count. If a nation has more than one capital (i.e., Bolivia's La Paz/Sucre) you can use either.
ReplyDeleteFWIW this same puzzle can be done with US state capials (or any nation's provinces) if you wish.
Rome / Vatican City at least ties Kinshasa / Brazzaville for two closest. Probably exceeds as there is no massive river separating downtowns, and comes up closer (1.71 vs 5-something miles).
ReplyDeleteClosest we've found for three: Bridgetown (Barbados), Kingstown (St. Vincent & The Grenadines) and Castries (St. Lucia), which break down as follows:
ReplyDeleteCastries (St. Lucia) - Kingstown (St. Vincent & the Grenadines): 61 miles
Kingstown - Bridgetown (Barbados): 108 miles
Castries - Bridgetown: 112 miles
281 miles.
A number of others make it into the 280 range including Rome/Vatican/San Marino and Castries / Kingstown / St. Georges (Grenada) but none have had a smaller total distance.
and the winner, found by Randall on E-Sam, was Vienna / Bratislava / Budapest:
ReplyDeleteVienna -> Bratislava is 34.8 miles
Bratislava -> Budapest is 101.9 miles
Budapest -> Vienna is 135.3 miles
272 total miles.