The main goal of this paper is to study empirically the export decisions of the European firms and to explore their international activities to the European Neighbouring Countries (ENCs). We investigate what are the main characteristics, behaviour and strategies of European firms that export to and invest in one or more ENCs, in order to single out which are at the national level (data are not available at the regional level) the location determinants of European investments and trade patterns. We concentrate our analysis on exporting flows for which data are very detailed, and starting from this, we explore which are the main European exporting destinations and investigate on the intensive and the extensive margin; we control for several firms' characteristics and if exporting firms are active in foreign markets. To achieve our aims, we use the EFIGE dataset on firms from seven European countries and we isolate and compare exports to 16 neighbouring countries, with respect to all other possible world destinations.