A Nobel Prize-winning economist once said there were four kinds of countries: the developed, the underdeveloped, Japan, and Argentina. He meant it as a puzzle — how does a country with some of the finest farmland on Earth, the world's greatest beef culture, and a population that produces Borges and Messi and Piazzolla keep finding new ways to make itself poorer?

Argentina is the eighth-largest country on Earth. The Andes run its entire western edge, home to Aconcagua — the highest mountain in the Western Hemisphere. The Pampas feed a hundred million cattle. Patagonia stretches cold and empty to the tip of the continent. And at the northeastern corner, Iguazú Falls — 275 cascades across 2.7 kilometres — are the largest waterfall system on Earth.

Ray takes you through the full sweep: the gauchos and the immigration wave that made Buenos Aires the Paris of South America; the rise and fall and return of Juan Perón; Evita — dead at 33, mythologised ever since; the Dirty War in which 30,000 people were disappeared; the Falklands; the 2001 economic collapse that produced five presidents in ten days. And the 2022 World Cup, which ended 36 years of hurt and produced what witnesses described as the largest spontaneous human gathering in the history of the Southern Hemisphere.

We meet Borges, who invented ideas that philosophers and computer scientists are still working through. We meet Maradona — the Hand of God and the Goal of the Century in the same five minutes. We meet Messi. We meet Astor Piazzolla, who turned tango into concert music. And we eat asado — not a recipe, a religion — and dulce de leche and empanadas and drink Malbec from the vineyards of Mendoza.

And we learn what the pause in a tango actually means.

New episodes every Monday at 7pm. Next week — Armenia.

There is a beach in Barbuda called Princess Diana Beach. It is pink-tinged, quiet, and so beautiful that Diana called it the finest she had ever seen — three months before she died. In 2017, Hurricane Irma destroyed 95 percent of Barbuda's structures. The beach survived. The island had to be rebuilt.

This is Antigua and Barbuda. Two islands. 442 square kilometres. A population of 98,000. And a history of sugar, slavery, cricket, and hurricane that is both particular to this corner of the Caribbean and entirely universal to the story of the Atlantic world.

Ray takes you through 350 years of British colonial rule — the enslaved people who worked the sugar estates, the resistance of Prince Klass who planned an uprising and paid for it with his life, the labour movement of 1939 that produced V.C. Bird and eventually independence in 1981. We trace the story of cricket as identity — how a game imported by colonisers was transformed into an instrument of pride by the colonised, producing from a country of under 100,000 people four of the greatest players in the history of the sport: Andy Roberts, Viv Richards, Richie Richardson, and Curtly Ambrose.

We meet Jamaica Kincaid, whose essay A Small Place is the most honest book ever written about what Caribbean tourism costs and who pays. We eat fungee and pepperpot, ducana and saltfish, and Barbudan lobster grilled on the beach. We sail into English Harbour — where Nelson called it a vile hole and is now UNESCO-listed. And we stand at Codrington Lagoon as thousands of frigate birds wheel overhead.

Know what you're standing on.

New episodes every Monday at 7pm. Next week — Argentina.

It has no airport, no army, and no coastline. It is ruled by two princes, neither of whom is Andorran, neither of whom has ever lived there. And it has survived, unbroken, since 1278 — through the Hundred Years' War, the Napoleonic Wars, the Spanish Civil War, and two World Wars raging on both sides of its border.

Andorra is the last surviving example of a medieval co-principality, tucked into the eastern Pyrenees between France and Spain. Ray takes you through how a 13th-century property dispute created one of the strangest governments on Earth — one where the French President and the Spanish Bishop of Urgell still share the throne today, entirely by historical accident.

We trace how complete obscurity became Andorra's greatest asset, how a population of 85,000 now hosts 8 million tourists a year, and how a country with no natural resources beyond mountain pasture became one of Europe's wealthiest nations per capita. We eat Escudella, the stew that's really a philosophy. We ski Grandvalira. And we ask what it means to be a sovereign nation that has, for 700 years, succeeded mainly by being left alone.

New episodes every Monday at 7pm. Next week — Angola.