It has no airport, no army, and no coastline. It is ruled by two princes, neither of whom is Andorran, neither of whom has ever lived there. And it has survived, unbroken, since 1278 — through the Hundred Years' War, the Napoleonic Wars, the Spanish Civil War, and two World Wars raging on both sides of its border.

Andorra is the last surviving example of a medieval co-principality, tucked into the eastern Pyrenees between France and Spain. Ray takes you through how a 13th-century property dispute created one of the strangest governments on Earth — one where the French President and the Spanish Bishop of Urgell still share the throne today, entirely by historical accident.

We trace how complete obscurity became Andorra's greatest asset, how a population of 85,000 now hosts 8 million tourists a year, and how a country with no natural resources beyond mountain pasture became one of Europe's wealthiest nations per capita. We eat Escudella, the stew that's really a philosophy. We ski Grandvalira. And we ask what it means to be a sovereign nation that has, for 700 years, succeeded mainly by being left alone.

New episodes every Monday at 7pm. Next week — Angola.

It is the largest country in Africa. More than four-fifths of it is the Sahara Desert. And painted on the walls of its ancient sandstone plateaus are the memories of a world ten thousand years gone — elephants and giraffes and the people who hunted them, preserved in the dry Saharan air long after the land turned to dust.

Algeria is a country of staggering contrasts. A Mediterranean coastline of white cities and ancient harbours. A mountainous north where Amazigh Berber culture has survived for millennia. And then the Sahara — vast, silent, extraordinary — where Roman cities lie half-buried in the sand and prehistoric rock art covers the cliffs of Tassili n'Ajjer.

Ray takes you through all of it. The history — from the ancient Numidian kingdom and the Roman province that gave the world Saint Augustine, through Ottoman corsairs and 132 years of French colonialism that changed the world's understanding of colonialism and ended with a nation dancing in the streets in July 1962. We meet Abd al-Qadir — the warrior-philosopher who has a town named after him in Iowa. We meet Albert Camus, who won the Nobel Prize and never stopped being Algerian. We meet Zinedine Zidane. And we meet Cheb Khaled — the King of Raï, the bestselling Arabic-language singer in history, whose voice rose from the cabarets of Oran to the top of the charts in Paris, London, and Mumbai.

We eat couscous, merguez, chorba, and Deglet Noor dates so good they're called fingers of light. We watch the sunrise from the Ahaggar Mountains. We stand in the Roman city of Timgad, unchanged for 1,900 years. And we listen to Raï — the music that said the things nobody else would say.

The desert remembers everything.

New episodes every Monday at 7pm. Next week — Andorra.

It is one of the smallest countries in Europe. For 46 years, it was the most isolated nation on Earth. And it is one of the most beautiful, strangest, and least-known destinations on the continent.

Albania sits on the western edge of the Balkans, facing Italy across a narrow strip of Adriatic Sea, with beaches that rival Greece, mountains that rival Switzerland, and a history layered with ancient Illyrian roots, Byzantine cities, Ottoman centuries, and a communist dictatorship so paranoid that it built over 170,000 concrete bunkers — one for every four citizens — to defend against an invasion that never came.

Ray takes you through it all. The dramatic geography, from the turquoise Albanian Riviera to the Accursed Mountains of the north. The full sweep of history — from the ancient colony of Apollonia to the 15th-century warrior hero Skanderbeg, who held the Ottoman Empire at bay for 25 years, to Enver Hoxha's sealed, bunker-riddled police state, to the chaotic, remarkable rebirth of the 1990s.

We meet Mother Teresa, whose Albanian parents gave the world one of its greatest humanitarians. We meet Ismail Kadare, who wrote masterworks of world literature under a dictatorship. We meet Dua Lipa and Mira Murati — a global pop icon and a former CTO of OpenAI — both proudly Albanian.

We eat Tavë Kosi — the baked lamb and yogurt dish once ranked the best traditional dish on the planet. We drink raki before noon without apology. We listen to iso-polyphonic singing, an ancient choral tradition so extraordinary UNESCO protects it. And we walk the cobbled streets of Berat and Gjirokastër, two UNESCO cities of stone and Ottoman windows that most of the world has never heard of.

The eagle's country. Come and meet it.

New episodes every Monday at 7pm. Next week — Algeria.