Question:

Surprisingly, I wasn't able to find ANY meaningfull information in 30 minutes of search in all the right places..it's suspicious, I think I am doing something wrong. I would add, that the solution should be without requiring third party code or webservices..

I actually wrote a category to address this caveat in the CLPlacemark class. It currently uses the -ISOCountryCode property to map it to its correspondent continent.

<a href="https://github.com/Hecktorzr/Transcontinental" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/Hecktorzr/Transcontinental</a>

How are you using the CLGeocoder at the moment. Without seeing some code not much we can suggest ...

However, if you are trying to get information on where the user is or where a location is you can use this:

{ CLLocationManager *location = [[CLLocationManager alloc] init]; [location setDelegate:self]; [location startUpdatingLocation]; [location setDesiredAccuracy:kCLLocationAccuracyBest]; CLGeocoder *geocoder = [[CLGeocoder alloc] init]; [geocoder reverseGeocodeLocation:location.location completionHandler:^(NSArray *placemarks, NSError *error) { CLPlacemark *placemark = [placemarks objectAtIndex:0]; NSLog(@"%@ %@ %@ %@ %@ %@ %@ %@", placemark.country, placemark.ISOcountryCode, placemark.postalCode, placemark.administrativeArea, placemark.locality, placemark.subLocality, placemark.thoroughfare, placemark.subThoroughfare); [geocoder release]; [location release]; }]; }