Telling neighbours apart: Spain and Portugal, Czechia and Slovakia, Nordics

Published 4 November 2026 · 9 min read

Some of the trickiest rounds in Far Fetched come down to two countries that sit side by side. Neighbours often share a climate, similar roads and closely related languages. Yet small, reliable differences almost always exist, and the most dependable ones are in the writing. This guide works through three classic puzzles in Europe: Spain and Portugal, Czechia and Slovakia, and the Nordic countries.

Spain and Portugal: start with the spelling

Spanish and Portuguese are close cousins, and a quick glance at a sign can fool you. These letters and spellings separate them:

• Portuguese puts a tilde on vowels: ã and õ, as in São, não (no) and informações. Words ending in -ção, plural -ções, are everywhere: estação (station), atenção (attention). It also uses ç, as in praça (square).
• Where Spanish writes ñ, Portuguese writes nh, and where Spanish has ll, Portuguese often has lh. Compare Portuguese Espanha with Spanish España, or the Portuguese town of Batalha with the Spanish word batalla.
• Spanish uses ñ, and its version of the -ção ending is -ción: estación, información.

Everyday words help too. A Portuguese street is a rua, a Spanish one a calle. An exit is saída in Portuguese and salida in Spanish. The town council is the Câmara Municipal in Portugal and the Ayuntamiento in Spain. Even little words give it away: Portuguese uses o, a, do and da (Rua da Liberdade), where Spanish uses el, la and del (Calle del Sol).

Watch out for Spain's other languages

Spain is not only Spanish-speaking. Several regions have their own official language, and signs there are often bilingual or written mainly in the regional language.

• Galician, spoken in Galicia in the north-west, directly north of Portugal, looks remarkably like Portuguese. A street is a rúa, an exit a saída, and names use do and da. The differences: Galician has no ã or õ, normally writes ñ where Portuguese writes nh (as in A Coruña), ends words in -ción rather than -ção, and uses the letter x a lot (the regional government is the Xunta de Galicia). The town council is the Concello.
• Catalan, used in Catalonia, the Balearic Islands and the Valencia region (where it is called Valencian), also has ç, as in plaça, so don't treat ç as proof of Portugal. Catalan's own giveaways are ny (Catalunya), a dot in the middle of a double l (col·legi), carrer for street and sortida for exit.
• Basque, used in the Basque Country and parts of Navarre, looks unlike any other European language, with lots of k, tx, tz and z. A street is a kalea, and "welcome" is ongi etorri.

Roads, landscapes and buildings

Road numbers can help. Spain writes its motorway numbers with a hyphen, as in A-6 or AP-7, and its national roads in the same style, such as N-340. Portugal has route codes you won't find in Spain, IP (main route) and IC (complementary route), alongside its A motorways. In Spain you may also spot a huge black bull silhouette standing on a hilltop beside the highway; these have become a famous part of the Spanish roadside.

Landscape gives softer hints. Much of inland Spain is a high, dry plateau with wide open fields, olive groves and brown or reddish earth, and the south-east is close to semi-desert. Portugal is mostly lower and, especially in the north, greener and damper, with plenty of pine and eucalyptus. The catch is that Spain's own north-west, Galicia, is just as green, which is another reason Galicia and northern Portugal are so easy to confuse. In the Alentejo, in southern Portugal, look for rolling plains dotted with cork oaks. Where the bark has been stripped, the trunks show a reddish-brown colour, often with a painted number recording when the cork was last harvested.

Buildings make a good tie-breaker. Portugal loves azulejos, glazed ceramic tiles, often blue and white, covering house fronts, churches and station walls. In the south, white houses are often trimmed with a band of blue or yellow around the doors, windows and base of the walls. Town pavements are frequently made of small black and white stones laid in patterns. Spain has whitewashed villages too, particularly in Andalusia, so whiteness alone isn't enough: look for the coloured trims and the tiles.

Find more detail in the country guides for Spain and Portugal.

Czechia and Slovakia: a handful of letters

Czechia and Slovakia were one country until 1993, and their languages are so close that Czechs and Slovaks can usually understand each other. Road signs and many building styles are similar too. That makes the alphabet your best tool, and luckily each language has letters the other never uses.

• Czech only: ř, a famous sound found in the composer's name Dvořák and the town of Přerov; ů, a u with a small ring, as in dům (house); and ě, as in město (town).
• Slovak only: ä, as in mäso (meat), seen on butcher's shops; ô; ľ, as in the town of Stará Ľubovňa; and the rarer ĺ and ŕ.

One letter is enough. A single ř or ů on a sign means Czech; a single ä or ľ means Slovak. If none of them appear, read the words instead. Many common words differ by just a letter or two, and a few are completely different:

Place names have patterns as well. Both countries have towns ending in -ice (Czech Pardubice, Slovak Košice), but Czech names often stretch that to -ovice, as in České Budějovice, while the shorter -ovce, as in Michalovce, is typically Slovak.

Southern Slovakia is home to many Hungarian speakers, and town signs there often show the Hungarian name as well. Hungarian letters such as ő and ű, with their double accent marks, never appear in Czech or Slovak, so seeing them near the border points to southern Slovakia or to Hungary itself.

The landscape helps a little. Czechia is mostly rolling hills, fields and forests ringed by fairly low mountain ranges, with many fishponds in the south. Slovakia is more mountainous, especially in the north and centre, where the Tatras rise to sharp, rocky peaks, while the south-west is flat farmland near the Danube. A road winding along a narrow valley under high forested slopes feels Slovak; a gentle patchwork of fields and villages feels Czech. Both countries have both kinds of scenery, though, so let the letters decide. The guides to Czechia and Slovakia have more.

The Nordic countries: letters and words

Norway, Sweden and Finland all border one another, so mixing them up still earns 2 points. Denmark's only land border is with Germany, and Iceland has none, so those two are worth getting exactly right. Each language has a recognisable set of extra letters.

• Norwegian and Danish: æ, ø and å. An ø anywhere means Norway or Denmark (or the Faroe Islands).
• Swedish: å, ä and ö, and never æ or ø.
• Finnish: ä and ö, but no å in Finnish words. Finnish is not related to Swedish and looks it: long words, plenty of k, and doubled letters everywhere, both vowels (aa, ää, ii) and consonants (kk, tt, ll). Jyväskylä and liikenne (traffic) show the pattern.
• Icelandic: þ (thorn) and ð (eth), plus æ, ö and accented vowels such as á. No other national language uses þ, so one þ settles it. Faroese uses ð but not þ.

Swedish and Sámi in Finland

Finland has two national languages, Finnish and Swedish. In parts of the west and south coast, place names appear in both, with the local majority language first: Helsinki / Helsingfors, Turku / Åbo. So Swedish on a sign doesn't rule Finland out. In fact, if the same sign shows a Finnish name and a Swedish one, you are almost certainly in Finland. In the far north of Norway, Sweden and Finland, you may also see Sámi place names with letters such as đ and ŋ.

The Nordic countries: roads, landscapes and houses

Road markings split the three neighbours neatly. Norway and Finland both use yellow lines to separate traffic going in opposite directions, with white lines along the edges. Sweden uses white lines throughout, and so does Denmark. On a two-way road, a yellow centre line rules Sweden out, while a white one points away from Norway and Finland. Our guide to road line colours shows how this works elsewhere.

The landscapes each have their own character:

• Norway: steep mountains, deep fjords, waterfalls and roads squeezed between rock and water, with many tunnels. Bare rock is everywhere.
• Sweden: gently rolling forest of spruce, pine and birch, broken by lakes, fields and scattered grey boulders. The far south is open farmland.
• Finland: flatter still, with forest and lakes reaching to the horizon and smooth granite outcrops beside the road. Away from the far north, hills are low.
• Denmark: low and mostly farmland, with hedges, beech woods and the sea never far away. There are no mountains.
• Iceland: very few trees; instead, moss-covered lava fields, black sand, bare mountains and wide, empty views.

Houses add colour, quite literally. Red-painted wooden houses with white corners and window frames are a classic sight in Sweden, and they are common in Norway and Finland as well. The deep red is a traditional paint first made from leftovers of the copper mine at Falun in Sweden. Norway also has plenty of white, yellow and other coloured wooden houses, often perched on slopes. Danish homes are more often built of red or yellow brick, and some country cottages still have thatched roofs. In Iceland, many houses are clad in corrugated metal, often with brightly painted roofs.

Finally, look up. Flagpoles are common in Nordic gardens, and all five countries fly a Nordic cross flag: Denmark's is red with a white cross, Norway's red with a blue cross edged in white, Sweden's blue with a yellow cross, Finland's white with a blue cross and Iceland's blue with a red cross edged in white. Our guide to learning flags covers more look-alikes.

Norwegian and Danish are the hardest pair to separate on paper, because they share æ, ø and å. Look at the spelling of common words: Norwegian has vei and sentrum, Danish vej and centrum. If that fails, the landscape usually decides it, since mountains and fjords rule Denmark out straight away.

For a wider look at writing systems, read how to read the world's alphabets, and for another tricky corner of Europe, try telling the Balkans apart.

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