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Can you place all 357 municipalities of Norway?
Can you locate all 18 regions of France?
Can you locate all 19 autonomous communities of Spain?
Can you locate all 12 provinces of the Netherlands?
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Estonia is a small, flat country with a lot of coast, and its fifteen counties are the tier everybody uses: they name the number plate series, the regional hospital and the weather forecast. Learning them is a matter of reading the map from Tallinn outwards, across the north, down the Russian border and over the water to the islands.
The maakonnad: fifteen counties, each named for its administrative centre or for the historic land it covers, with Harju around Tallinn and Pärnu the largest by area. Hiiu County is the smallest and is a single island and its satellites, and Saare County is Saaremaa, the biggest island in the country, with Muhu and Ruhnu beside it.
The English names carry the word County and the local name is a switch in the start dialog, so Harju is Harju maakond. The counties are the municipalities of Estonia Municipalities dissolved, so the borders of the two maps match exactly.
The groups are the five statistical regions the country is sorted into for Eurostat: North, which is Harju alone, Northeast, which is Ida-Viru alone, and West, Central and South, which hold the rest.
Harju holds Tallinn and about two in five of the country's people. It runs along the Gulf of Finland, with the Pakri peninsula and the Viimsi peninsula both pushing out into it, and it is the easiest county to place first.
Saare County is Saaremaa and the islands around it, including Muhu, which a causeway joins to the mainland side, and the tiny Ruhnu out in the Gulf of Riga. Nothing else on the map is a shape like it, which makes it an easy find.
Hiiu County is Hiiumaa, a round island north of Saaremaa, and it is the smallest county on the map. Only Saare County, next to it, is also made entirely of islands.
Fifteen. They are the first tier of the country, below the state, and they have been stable for decades, even though the municipalities beneath them were merged in 2017.
Pärnu County in the south-west is the largest by area, and Harju County around Tallinn is the largest by population.
No. Eurostat sorts the fifteen into five regions, and those are the groups in this quiz. A county is a unit of the state with a governor's office; a statistical region is a unit of the statistics office.
The tier below this one is Estonia Municipalities, whose counties are the groups there. For another small country at this level, see Slovenia Regions.
