Our 6th NomadMania Conference in Ouro Preto, Brazil was dedicated to developing the UN+ list into a more comprehensive and representative list. Many travellers seek an extra layer of accomplishment beyond countries but lesser than regions, and our aim was to establish the definitive, finite and doable list that travellers can aspire to.
This list will hereby be called ATLAS – an acronym for Additional Territories, Lands and States.
Two months ago, we published the deliberations of our ATLAS Committee, with their rationale of the criteria for ATLAS, which essentially aims to be a list of political entities which can be claimed as separate from countries and worthy of inclusion. Following a call for your involvement and messages received, the ATLAS Committee has made some tweaks.
The NomadMania ATLAS committee
Two key points to remember, based on the vote of the participants in Ouro Preto: The ATLAS list is not to include uninhabited areas; but it will include Antarctica as a single exception.
The final ATLAS list comprises 137 areas. More than half of these were part of the former UN+ list. England is the only area which has been deleted from the ‘new’ ATLAS list, along with every UN country listing. In other words, we have deleted the 193 countries that used to be part of UN+ and retained only those which are separate entities.
What is new, however, are the more than 60 additions to ATLAS – including more than 20 republics or okrugs of Russia, which sees the biggest increase, and the five union territories of India, for example. All the new ATLAS regions are NomadMania regions, or a combination of more than one NomadMania regions, with one exception: the Juan Fernandez Islands of Chile make the cut for ATLAS while not being a separate NomadMania region.
Juan Fernandez – the only ATLAS region that is not a NomadMania region
The ATLAS list is visible in all our members’ profiles as the UN+ list before it was – and your ‘score’ for these is calculated automatically based on your having marked regions as visited on our Masterlist (in the case of Juan Fernandez, marking them in the DARE list). The ranking of travellers based on ATLAS will also be presented under rankings, as before, while counting as an overall percentage of the ‘score’ for the calculation of TBT.
We trust that the 137 regions will provide an inspiration for many travellers to explore further – especially for those who have reached 193 UN countries or are very close, the ATLAS
regions should serve as a motivator for continued endless exploring.
In our next NomadMania Conference in Moldova, our theme is much linked to ATLAS. We will be discussing ethnicities and minorities with a view to perhaps creating a distinct ATLAS II listing, which can focus on areas of special interest of a more cultural, rather than political, nature.
ATLAS should be perceived as a dynamic list that follows geopolitical developments. With that in mind, there is every reason to believe that this list may expand or contract depending on how the world and its political divisions may change. We will be reviewing ATLAS annually, with calls open for nominations of new additions that satisfy the criteria before the review.
