Drill the map, not flashcards. Free, no account.
Loading game...
Can you place all 56 provinces of Chile?
Can you locate all 26 regions of Peru?
Can you locate all 26 states of Brazil, and the Federal District?
Can you place all 293 census divisions of Canada?
Something on this map looks wrong? Report a map issue
Argentina is divided into 23 provinces and an autonomous capital, and below them into the tier the country actually counts its people by: the departments, which Buenos Aires Province calls partidos. A department is where a census tract, a hospital district and a good part of the provincial government's paperwork are filed, and its name is on the sign at the edge of town. This page is the whole list, grouped by region the way the game groups it.
A departamento is the second tier of Argentine government: each province is divided into them, and together they cover the country with nothing left over. Buenos Aires Province is the exception in vocabulary only. Its 135 units are partidos, the same rank under another word, and they are the small shapes packed around the capital that make up the Gran Buenos Aires.
Two things about the count are worth knowing before you play. The capital city is a single target here: it is divided into fifteen comunas, but they are an arrangement inside one city rather than departments, and at six to fourteen square kilometres each there is no way to tell them apart on a map of the whole country. And Tierra del Fuego shows two departments, Ushuaia and Río Grande. The boundary file this game is drawn from predates the department of Tolhuin, which was cut out of Río Grande, so Río Grande is drawn with Tolhuin inside it and Tolhuin cannot be asked for.
The size range is the first thing to get used to. The largest, Deseado in Santa Cruz, is bigger than Croatia, and the smallest are city districts like Capital in San Juan or Vicente López on the edge of Buenos Aires, which are a few kilometres across. Between the two, the country thickens from the north to the south: the Andes and the northwest are packed with small departments, the pampas are a grid of mid-sized ones, and Patagonia is a handful of enormous ones.
The traps are mostly names that travel and names that look alike. Colón is in Buenos Aires Province, Córdoba and Entre Ríos, and Santa María is in Córdoba and Catamarca. General Lamadrid and General La Madrid are two different departments, in La Rioja and in Buenos Aires, spelled differently. None of this is a memory problem: it is a reading problem, and the whole label is the answer.
Each region can be switched on and off on its own in the start dialog, which is the only sane way through a list this long. A fresh game opens on Cuyo, which is 46 departments in three provinces along the Andes, and the Pampas, which are two fifths of the whole, are better kept for later.
Deseado is the largest department in the country, a coastal plateau in southern Patagonia with the city of Caleta Olivia on its north edge and Puerto Deseado at its mouth. It is the clearest example of how the scale changes across the map: this one shape is more than a thousand times the size of Vicente López, the smallest partido beside Buenos Aires. Santa Cruz has only seven departments, and the four big ones in its south are the ones to learn first.
The same word is the name of a department in eleven provinces, and each is asked for with its province after it. Capital means the department around the provincial capital city, which is why it is small in the dry west, where a few oases hold the population, and larger in the pampas. This one holds the city of Mendoza and is under a hundredth the size of Malargüe, the largest department in the same province.
The autonomous city of Buenos Aires is a single click on this map, even though it is divided into fifteen comunas, and it is not part of the province of the same name that wraps around it on three sides. Ask for the province's partidos and you want the shapes around it, La Matanza, Lomas de Zamora, Tigre and Vicente López among them.
The second tier of Argentine government: every province is divided into them, they cover the country with nothing left over, and they are what the census counts. Buenos Aires Province calls its own partidos, which are the same rank under another name.
Around 530 depending on how the Buenos Aires comunas and the Antarctic and South Atlantic departments are counted. This game has 512 targets: the departments and partidos of the 23 provinces that are on the mainland map, and the autonomous city of Buenos Aires as one.
Because the name alone is not an answer. Forty-seven names are shared by more than one department, and the commonest, Capital, is in eleven provinces. The bracket says which one the game means.
Only the word. Buenos Aires Province, uniquely, calls its second tier partidos, and the other 22 provinces call it departments.
The boundary file this game is drawn from predates the department of Tolhuin, which was cut out of the northern end of Río Grande in Tierra del Fuego. The two are drawn as one, under the name Río Grande.
The partidos around Buenos Aires, which are a few dozen small shapes packed against the capital, and the smallest departments of Tucumán, Santa Fe and Entre Ríos. The pairs that share a name are the other group, and they are lost by reading too fast rather than by not knowing.
The tier above this one is Argentina Provinces, and its five regions are the five groups here, so it is the place to start if this map is too much at once. For another country's second tier, Germany Districts is the closest in size.
