Southern and Mediterranean Europe

Southern Europe, centered on the Iberian, Italian, and Balkan peninsulas, is defined above all by the Mediterranean Sea, a nearly landlocked body of water connected to the Atlantic Ocean only through the narrow Strait of Gibraltar, roughly 14 kilometers wide at its narrowest point, and to the Black Sea through the Bosphorus and Dardanelles straits either side of Istanbul. The region gives its name to the Mediterranean climate, characterized by hot, dry summers and mild, wetter winters, a pattern found elsewhere in the world, from California to central Chile, but nowhere as extensively as around this inland sea, where it has shaped agricultural staples such as olives, grapes, and citrus fruit for millennia.