Andorra , [ e ] officially the Principality of Andorra , [ 2 ] [ f ] is a sovereign landlocked country on the Iberian Peninsula , in the eastern Pyrenees in Western Europe, bordered by France to the north and Spain to the south.
Believed to have been created by Charlemagne , Andorra was ruled by the count of Urgell until , when it was transferred to the Roman Catholic Diocese of Urgell. The present principality was formed by a charter in It is currently headed by two co-princes: the Bishop of Urgell in Spain , and the president of France.
Its capital and largest city is Andorra la Vella. Andorra is the sixth-smallest state in Europe , with an area of square kilometres sq mi and a population of approximately 79, Tourism in Andorra brings approximately 8 million visitors to the country annually. It has been a member of the United Nations since The origin of the word Andorra is unknown, although several hypotheses have been proposed.
The oldest is one put forward by the Greek historian Polybius Histories III, 35, 1 , who describes the Andosins, an Iberian Pre-Roman tribe , as historically located in the valleys of Andorra and facing the Carthaginian army in its passage through the Pyrenees during the Punic Wars. Another theory suggests that the word Andorra may derive from the old word Anorra that contains the Basque word ur "water". When the Moors conquered the Iberian Peninsula, the valleys of the High Pyrenees were covered by large tracts of forest.
These regions were not administered by Muslims , because of the geographic difficulty of direct rule. Other theories suggest that the term derives from the Navarro-Aragonese "andurrial", which means "land covered with bushes" or "scrubland". The folk etymology holds that Charlemagne had named the region as a reference to the Biblical Canaanite valley of Endor or Andor where the Midianites had been defeated , a name bestowed by his heir and son Louis the Pious after defeating the Moors in the "wild valleys of Hell".
