Africa & Middle East

14 records, the smallest region in the collection and the one where the boundary is most often made by landscape rather than by purchase.

Zighy Bay is closed by the Hajar mountains on three sides and entered over a pass, by boat or by paraglide. Six Senses Shaharut is cut into a cliff above the Arava valley, and the mountains that colour its horizon stand across the border in Jordan — a borrowed enclosure in the most literal sense. Amanjena turns inward around an irrigation basin because the country outside it is not desert but the developed edge of Marrakech.

Shaharut also carries the collection's only boundary negotiated with neighbours: the off-grid village of about a hundred and sixty people over the hill had standing to object, and the low profile and hidden services answer them.

What is thin here is coverage. Three records are written of fourteen, and the continent's interior — the estates of southern and eastern Africa — belongs largely to the safari register rather than to this one.