Ever want your own country? Check out Sealand

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In the choppy North Sea about six miles off the English coast, a floating, rusty World War II fort is a self-proclaimed independent nation. Owned by one family for nearly 50 years, the Principality of Sealand peddles its own currency, citizenship, and has a defensive force ready to jump into action if enemy forces invade again as they did decades ago. The 50-citizen, 1,800-square-foot country resides on a platform of steel and concrete, supported by two beams reaching deep into the sea.

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The story of Sealand dates back to the 1960s, when a former British Army major named Paddy Roy Bates took control of a small outpost in the North Sea, three miles from the mainland’s coast. According to Bates’s lawyer, the platform’s location in international waters and abandonment by the U.K. made it up for grabs.

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In 1978, a group of Germans and Dutch hoping to turn it into a luxury casino descended on the platform and held Bates’s son Michael hostage without food or water for three days. Then they dropped him in the Netherlands. The invaders were led by a man proclaiming to be the Prime Minister of Sealand. The senior Bates, who had been lured by the businessmen to Austria, returned and connected with his son in Britain. The family hatched a plan to recapture their nation, hiring a helicopter to bring them back to Sealand and descending in a dramatic raid. The unwelcome outsiders surrendered and were taken by the Bateses as POWs. Unaided by Britain, Germany sent over a diplomat to free the now imprisoned invaders, who returned home to Germany and promptly set up the exiled “Sealand Rebel Government.”

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