Vale

Vale (officially the Republic of Vale (République du Val in Valois), is a unitary presidential republic, member state of the United States of Kobol on planet Kobol. Vale is the only unitary republic in the United States of Kobol.

Etymology
The name "Val", which comes from the Valois word vallée or valley in Basic, originally referred to the area around Val d'Or where the Gold River ends up in the Gold Fjord.

Prehistory
During the most recent glacial period the entire Vale peninsula is under a sheet of ice. As the ice cap begins to withdraw, about 12,000 years ago, hunter-gatherers move north in pursuit of reindeer. The living survivors of the hunter-gatherers in these regions are the Eskimos, who today herd rather than hunt reindeer. Their language, Inuktitut, is unique, composed of Inuktitut syllabics.

Archaeology provides rich traces of Vale prehistory, from the neolithic period (c.2500 BC) to the Bronze Age (c.1500 BC) and into the Iron Age (c.400 BC). Objects found in tombs show strong trading links with the Roman civilization to the south. But the Valois finds also include rarities preserved by the tannin in peat bogs - among them a wooden cart and the bodies of sacrificial victims from about 2000 years ago, now in the National Museum in Lutece. In the centuries immediately before the earliest written records, the people of this northern peninsula feature prominently in the history of their southern neighbours - through their strong inclination to move away from home in warlike mood. The achievement abroad of the Vandals in the 9th and 10th century (in colonization and trade, as much as in direct and brutal conquest) is extraordinary in itself.

Antiquity
In the period of Kobol History known as Antiquity, Vale was divided into two territories, separated by a protecting wall.

Geography
The geography of the Vale is extremely varied. Notable are the northwestern fjords, the Gold Mountains, the flat, low areas near Lutece, and the archipelagos. central vale has many lakes and moraines, legacies of the ice age.

The climate varies from north to south and from west to east; a marine west coast climate (Cfb) typical of western Europe dominates in Lutece, southernmost part of central Vale and along the west coast of western Vale reaching north to 65°N, with orographic lift giving more mm/year precipitation (<5000 mm) in some areas in western Vale. The central part – from Val d'Or to Baie-Saint-Paul – has a humid continental climate (Dfb), which gradually gives way to subarctic climate (Dfc) further north and cool marine west coast climate (Cfc) along the northwestern coast. A small area along the northern coast east of the North Cape has tundra climate (Et) as a result of a lack of summer warmth. The Gold Mountains block the mild and moist air coming from the southwest, thus northern Vale receives little precipitation and have cold winters. Large areas in the Gold mountains have alpine tundra climate.

The warmest temperature ever recorded in Vale is 38.0 °C in Sainte-Marie. The coldest temperature ever recorded is −52.6 °C in Makadewa. Southwesterly winds further warmed by foehn wind can give warm temperatures in narrow northwestern fjords in winter; Amos has recorded 17.9 °C in January and Tadoussac 18.9 °C in February.

Administrative divisions


The Vale is divided into units at the regional and local levels. The primary types of subdivision are administrative regions and municipalities. The highest level of organization is the administrative region (région administrative). Vale has 16 administrative regions. They serve primarily to organize the provision of national government services, most significantly the allocation of regional economic development funding. Moreover, they are the basis for regional coordination of local governments through regional conferences of elected officers or CREs (conférences régionales des élus).

The primary level of local organization is the "local municipality" or municipalité locale, although this term groups together numerous more specific legal designations such as ville ("city" or "town"), municipalité ("municipality"), village ("village"), paroisse ("parish"), commune and, strictly speaking incorrectly, village nordique ("northern village"). Local municipalities have authority over most local government matters.

In addition to local municipalities, there are two other kinds of administrative entity at the local level which are not general features of municipal organization in Vale, but which occur in a limited number of areas, especially urban ones, and retain some features of previous states of municipal organization in those areas. These are the borough (or arrondissement), which is submunicipal, and the agglomeration (agglomération), which may group together a number of local municipalities.

A few local municipalities are divided into boroughs (arrondissements). Some municipal functions are delegated to borough councils (conseils d'arrondissement) if it is deemed desirable for these functions to be administered more locally. The powers of the borough council vary from municipality to municipality and even from borough to borough within a single municipality and are often guaranteed by national statute.

At the beginning of the 1990s, the Vale government carried out a program of municipal mergers, hoping thereby to achieve economies of scale in municipal expenditures and greater fiscal equity. As a result, cities such as Lutece, Val d'Or, Rimouski, Baie-Saint-Paul absorbed neighbouring municipalities in 1992.