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Can you place all 56 provinces of Chile?
Can you locate all 23 provinces of Argentina, and its capital city?
Can you locate all 26 states of Brazil, and the Federal District?
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Colombia is the only South American country with coasts on both the Caribbean and the Pacific, and it uses both: the Andes split into three ranges just inside the border, and nearly everything a round shows you is a question of which side of those ranges you are on. The department is the unit that fixes it. Each is run by an elected governor and assembly, and almost every Colombian can place the dozen around the capital and loses the rest somewhere in the eastern plains.
The map has the 32 departments and Bogotá, which is a capital district rather than part of Cundinamarca and sits at the same level as the departments. The newest departments are the eastern and southern ones. Arauca, Casanare, Putumayo and Caquetá were intendencies, and Amazonas, Guainía, Guaviare, Vaupés and Vichada commissaries, run from the capital until the 1991 constitution made them departments. That is why they are large, thinly settled and drawn with the straightest lines.
San Andrés y Providencia is an archipelago about 700 km north-west of the mainland, closer to Nicaragua than to Colombia. It is drawn where it is, at the left edge of the map, and it is small enough that its tap area is widened beyond its shape.
The groups above the departments have no government and are the ones Colombians use to say where something is. The Andina region is the three cordilleras and the valleys between them, and holds the capital and most of the people. The Caribe is the north coast and its plains, and takes the islands too. The Pacífica is the wet coast and the south-western highlands that face it. The Orinoquía is the eastern plains, and the Amazonía is the forest that fills the south-east, down to the point of land at Leticia on the Amazon.
Bogotá is a district of its own, with a government separate from Cundinamarca's, and the department is drawn around it. On the map it is the small region you can find by the larger one that surrounds it, and it is the one to go to first when you are lost.
The archipelago of San Andrés, Providencia and Santa Catalina is Colombian territory off the Nicaraguan coast. It is the only department you cannot reach by land, and the only one where English is an official language beside Spanish.
Amazonas is the largest department, and it ends in the trapezoid of land around Leticia, the country's only port on the Amazon, wedged between Peru and Brazil. The tail at the bottom of the map is the part to look for.
32, plus Bogotá as a capital district, which is why quizzes count 33. Nine of them (Amazonas, Arauca, Casanare, Guainía, Guaviare, Putumayo, Vaupés, Vichada and San Andrés y Providencia) were territories until 1991, so a map from before then has far fewer.
No. It is the capital district and has been separate since 1991, although it is surrounded by Cundinamarca and the department's own capital is Bogotá too. Here it is its own answer.
They were national territories, run from the capital rather than by a local government, until 1991, and they cover the Orinoco plains and the Amazon forest, where few people live. Their borders were drawn long before anyone settled them.
The natural regions Colombians use to say where something is. They are not administrative divisions, and they are the groups this game is cut by. The islands of San Andrés y Providencia are counted with the Caribe here, as they sit in the Caribbean Sea.
Colombia has about 1,100 of them, which is more than a quiz of this kind can carry, so the department is the tier this game covers.
For another long South American country at this level, see Argentina Provinces, or for a country cut by one mountain range, Chile Regions.
