59 Fun Facts About Mediterranean Sea

Which is the smallest country with a coastline on the Mediterranean?

Monaco covers barely two square kilometres of the French Riviera; with no room to spread inland, it keeps growing seaward, building new districts on land reclaimed from the Mediterranean.

Which African country faces Spain across the narrowest part of the Strait of Gibraltar?

Morocco lies only about 13 to 14 km from Spain at the strait's narrowest point, close enough that the two governments have spent decades studying a rail tunnel under the seabed.

Which strait runs through Istanbul and opens into the Black Sea?

The Bosporus splits Istanbul between Europe and Asia; Greeks read its name as 'ox ford' and tied it to the myth of Io, said to have swum the strait after being turned into a heifer.

Which colour of dye did ancient Mediterranean peoples extract from murex sea snails?

Purple dye took thousands of murex snails to colour even the hem of a robe, which made it so costly that in time only emperors were allowed to wear it.

What does 'Mediterranean' literally mean in Latin?

In the middle of land is the literal sense of mediterraneus, from medius and terra; in classical Latin the word simply meant inland, and it became the sea's name only centuries later.

Which Latin name did the ancient Romans give the Mediterranean?

Mare Nostrum is still in use: Italy revived the name in 2013 for Operation Mare Nostrum, a year-long navy mission launched to rescue migrants in distress on the crossing.

Turks call the Black Sea Karadeniz; what does Akdeniz, their name for the Mediterranean, mean?

White Sea is the literal meaning, from ak and deniz; the name is thought to come from an old Turkic habit of giving compass points colours, with white for the west and black for the north.

The Old English name for the Mediterranean, Wendel-sæ, referred to which people?

The Vandals seized the North African coast and raided across the sea from Carthage; their sack of Rome in 455 is why a wilful wrecker is still called a vandal.

Which state is the only one ever to have controlled the entire Mediterranean coastline?

Only the Roman Empire has ever held every Mediterranean shore; the way was cleared in 67 BC, when Pompey swept pirates from the whole sea in a single campaign lasting a matter of months.

Which two civilisations were the earliest advanced societies trading across the Mediterranean?

Egyptians and Minoans were trading by sea in the Bronze Age: Cretan pottery reached Egypt, and tomb paintings at Thebes show 'Keftiu' envoys, thought to be Cretans, bringing gifts to the pharaoh's officials.

Which Persian king had a canal dug in Egypt to link the Red Sea with the Mediterranean?

Darius I set up stone stelae recording that he had ordered the canal dug; Herodotus says it was wide enough for two triremes rowed abreast and took four days to sail.

What are the two largest islands in the Mediterranean?

Sicily and Sardinia also made modern Italy: Garibaldi opened his 1860 campaign by landing in Sicily, and the King of Sardinia became the first king of the united country a year later.

What is the longest river that empties into the Mediterranean?

The Nile gave every river delta its name: Greek writers such as Herodotus likened its fan-shaped mouth on the Mediterranean to their triangular letter delta, and the word stuck.

Which two island countries lie within the Mediterranean?

Cyprus and Malta are the sea's only island nations; both were British colonies until the 1960s, which is why drivers in both still keep to the left.

The Calypso Deep, the Mediterranean's deepest point, lies off south-western Greece in which sea?

The Ionian Sea holds the Calypso Deep, more than 5,100 metres down; a French bathyscaphe first reached the bottom in 1965, and the second crewed dive did not come until 2020.

The Mediterranean's easternmost shore, on the Gulf of İskenderun, belongs to which country?

Turkey holds the far end of a sea that runs roughly 4,000 km from Gibraltar; its port of İskenderun was once Alexandretta, said to have been founded by Alexander the Great after his victory at nearby Issus.

Which event saw the Mediterranean, cut off from the Atlantic, largely dry up about 5.9 million years ago?

The Messinian salinity crisis left its mark under the seabed: drill cores found thick beds of salt, and the rivers feeding the basin cut canyons far below today's coast as the water fell.

The megaflood thought to have refilled the dried-out Mediterranean carried hundreds of times the flow of which river?

The Amazon is the largest river on Earth, yet models put this flood's peak at several hundred to a thousand times its flow, enough to refill most of the basin in under two years.

Which maritime republic's ruler 'married' the sea each year by casting a ring into the water?

Venice staged the rite every Ascension Day: the doge was rowed out on his gilded state barge, the Bucentaur, and threw the ring into the Adriatic to claim the sea as the city's bride.

What kind of water exchange takes place through the Strait of Gibraltar?

Gibraltar has a two-layer flow: less salty Atlantic water enters at the surface while denser, saltier Mediterranean water flows out beneath it toward the Atlantic.

Which Mediterranean port's lighthouse, the Pharos, was one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world?

Alexandria's tower guided ships for well over a thousand years before earthquakes felled it, and its name became the word for lighthouse itself: phare in French, faro in Spanish and Italian.

Which cold winter winds off France and the Balkans chill the Mediterranean enough to form its deep water?

Bora and Mistral, cold dry winter winds over the Adriatic and the Gulf of Lion respectively, chill and evaporate surface water until it becomes dense enough to sink.

Which animals on the Rock of Gibraltar are Europe's only wild monkeys?

Barbary macaques have roamed the Rock for centuries; more than once, when the troop dwindled to a handful, the British garrison shipped in fresh animals from North Africa to keep it going.

A shallow ridge between Sicily and which country divides the Mediterranean into two basins?

Tunisia's Cape Bon faces Sicily across a bank only a few hundred metres deep, a doorstep between two basins that each plunge for kilometres, which is why the sea is split into a western and an eastern half there.

Marsili, one of Europe's largest volcanoes, lies hidden under which sea between Naples and Sicily?

The Tyrrhenian Sea hides Marsili, a seamount some 3,000 metres tall; in 2010 a leading Italian volcanologist warned that its weak flanks could collapse and send a tsunami onto the southern Italian coast.

Which sea lies between Corsica and the Italian coast around Genoa?

The Ligurian Sea is the heart of the Pelagos Sanctuary, a whale and dolphin reserve created by international treaty in 1999 and believed to be the fin whale's main feeding ground in the Mediterranean.

Which ancient Greek find, often called the first computer, did sponge divers recover from a Mediterranean shipwreck?

The Antikythera mechanism came up with bronze statues from a wreck the divers had stumbled on in 1900; its gearwheels modelled the Sun and Moon and could predict eclipses.

The 1571 Battle of Lepanto was the last great naval battle fought mainly between which type of vessel?

Galleys rowed by thousands of oarsmen fought almost the whole battle; among the wounded was a young Spanish soldier, Miguel de Cervantes, who lost the use of his left hand and later wrote Don Quixote.

Which Ottoman admiral, a former corsair, beat Andrea Doria's Christian fleet at Preveza in 1538?

Barbarossa won against a Holy League fleet far larger than his own; Doria hung back for so long that he was said to have done it to spite his Venetian allies.

Which US president sent warships to the Mediterranean in 1801 rather than pay more tribute to North Africa's corsair states?

Thomas Jefferson refused Tripoli's demand for more money and sent the young US Navy instead; the war that followed is still remembered in the Marines' Hymn, in the line 'to the shores of Tripoli'.

The Battle of the Nile in 1798 was fought in which bay?

Nelson caught Brueys's French fleet at anchor in Aboukir Bay, off the Egyptian coast, and destroyed it in a night battle that left Napoleon's army stranded in Egypt.

The Suez Canal has no ship locks for what reason?

The water levels are essentially the same at both ends, so ships sail straight through; the canal's builder tried the same sea-level plan at Panama, went bankrupt, and that canal was finished with locks.

Species that invade the Mediterranean via the Suez Canal are known by what name?

Lessepsian migrants are named after Ferdinand de Lesseps, the French diplomat behind the canal; hundreds of Red Sea species have followed the ships through his waterway and settled in the eastern Mediterranean.

Which of these Mediterranean crops was introduced to Spain and Sicily during Arab rule?

Oranges arrived under Arab rule, along with a name that comes from the Arabic naranj; those first fruits were the bitter kind, and the sweet orange reached Europe only centuries later with Portuguese traders.

The English word 'oil' traces back to the ancient Greek name of which plant?

Olive oil was the only oil the word first meant, passed from Greek through Latin to most of Europe; Spanish is an exception, taking its everyday word, aceite, from the Arabic az-zayt instead.

Which Greek island is the flooded crater rim of a volcano that blew apart around 1600 BC?

Santorini, known to the ancient Greeks as Thera, was torn open by one of the largest eruptions in human history; its ash buried the Bronze Age town of Akrotiri so deeply that houses and wall paintings survived.

Which two cities did the 28 December 1908 earthquake and tsunami destroy?

Messina and Reggio Calabria face each other across the strait where the earthquake struck at about 5.20 in the morning; most people were asleep indoors, and the waves followed within minutes.

Which volcano, among Europe's tallest and most active, towers over eastern Sicily?

Etna is almost constantly active, yet its lower slopes are among the most crowded parts of Sicily: the lava weathers into soil so fertile that vineyards and orchards climb the mountain.

The Mediterranean's average salinity of 38 PSU is high because of what?

Evaporation exceeds precipitation and runoff by so much that, without Atlantic water pouring in through Gibraltar, the sea would slowly shrink into a salt lake.

Which plant, found only in the Mediterranean, forms the sea's vast underwater meadows?

Neptune grass grows so slowly that single plants have cloned themselves across as much as 15 km of seabed, which makes them thousands of years old and among the longest-lived organisms known.

Which Greek sea surrounds Alonissos, site of the national marine park protecting the monk seal?

The Aegean around Alonissos became Greece's first marine park in 1992 because the islands' sea caves shelter monk seals, a species reduced to fewer than a thousand animals.

The Colossus, a giant bronze statue of the sun god counted among the Seven Wonders, stood on which Mediterranean island?

Rhodes saw its statue stand for little more than fifty years before an earthquake toppled it; the fallen bronze drew sightseers for centuries, and the image of it straddling the harbour is a medieval invention.

The Transalpine Pipeline, which feeds refineries in Austria, Germany and Czechia, starts at which Italian port?

Trieste was Austria's main seaport until 1918 and in a sense still is: tankers unload there, and the crude is pumped over the Alps to the refineries of its old hinterland.

The largest group among the million-plus people who crossed the Mediterranean to Europe in 2015 came from which country?

Syria's civil war was by far the biggest driver of the 2015 crossings; most people made the short passage to Greek islands such as Lesbos and Kos, often in flimsy rubber dinghies.

Which giant fish enters the Mediterranean from the Atlantic each spring to spawn and has been trapped there since antiquity?

Bluefin tuna arrive so reliably that coastal fishermen have caught the run for some three thousand years in mazes of fixed nets, a method Spain still calls the almadraba.

Which international agreement aims to reduce pollution in the Mediterranean?

The Barcelona Convention of 1976 turned a clean-up plan the coastal states had agreed a year earlier under the UN into law; in 1995 it was widened from pollution alone to protecting the coast and its marine life.

By what name from antiquity were the mountains flanking the Strait of Gibraltar known?

The Pillars of Hercules were the Rock of Gibraltar and a peak on the African shore; in one telling the hero set them up on his way to steal the cattle of Geryon, and to the Greeks they marked the edge of the known world.

Besides the Greek city-states, which classical people colonised the Mediterranean coasts?

The Phoenicians, sailing from Tyre and Sidon, planted trading colonies as far west as Carthage and Cadiz, and carried with them the alphabet from which Greek and Latin letters descend.

The Rock of Gibraltar's name comes from an Arabic phrase honouring a commander; what does it mean?

Tariq's Mount, Jabal Tariq in Arabic, honours Tariq ibn Ziyad, the Berber commander who landed at the Rock early in the eighth century to begin the Muslim conquest of Iberia.

Which Spanish autonomous city sits on the African side of the Strait of Gibraltar?

Ceuta was stormed by Portugal in 1415, with the young Prince Henry the Navigator among the attackers; it passed to Spain along with the Portuguese crown in 1580 and has stayed Spanish ever since.

The caves of the Rock of Gibraltar are thought to have sheltered some of the last of which extinct humans?

Neanderthals gave the Rock a second claim to fame: a skull dug from a Gibraltar quarry in 1848 was the first adult of the species ever found, eight years before the German find that named it, but nobody realised what it was.

Majorca, Minorca and Ibiza belong to which Spanish island group in the western Mediterranean?

The Balearic Islands were famed in antiquity for their slingers, hired as mercenaries by Carthage; most ancient writers even traced the islands' name to a Greek word meaning 'to throw'.

Which arm of the Mediterranean forms its far western end, just inside the Strait of Gibraltar?

The Alboran Sea is where Atlantic water first flows in, so ocean species and Mediterranean ones mix there; it takes its name from Alborán, a small Spanish island within it.

Under which treaty was Gibraltar ceded in perpetuity to Britain?

The Peace of Utrecht confirmed in 1713 what force had already decided: an Anglo-Dutch fleet under Sir George Rooke had seized the Rock nine years earlier, during the War of the Spanish Succession.

Which hero of Homer spent ten years wandering the Mediterranean on his way home from the Trojan War?

Odysseus took a decade to get back to his island kingdom of Ithaca, and his name gave English the word 'odyssey', used since the 19th century for any long, adventurous journey.

Which strait separates Italy's heel from Albania at the mouth of the Adriatic?

The Strait of Otranto is barely 70 km wide, so in the First World War the Allies tried to cork it with a line of armed fishing boats; that kept Austria's warships bottled up but hardly slowed the U-boats.

Which film follows a U-boat crew ordered through the Strait of Gibraltar?

Das Boot draws on a real campaign: Germany sent 62 U-boats past British-held Gibraltar between 1941 and 1944, and not one of them ever came back out into the Atlantic.

What was the 1920s-30s scheme to dam the Strait of Gibraltar and lower the Mediterranean called?

Atlantropa was the dream of German architect Herman Sörgel, who promoted it until his death in 1952: giant dams would generate power and drop the sea by as much as 200 metres, baring new land to settle.

Napoleon was exiled in 1814 to which Mediterranean island, only to escape within a year?

Elba was his to rule: on his abdication the victors ceded him the island with sovereign rights, and after less than ten months he sailed for France and took power again, until his defeat at Waterloo.