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Can you locate all 264 delegations of Tunisia?
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Can you locate all 47 counties of Kenya?
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Senegal's 14 regions are divided into 46 departments, the tier that sits directly under them and the one the state actually runs: each has a prefect appointed from Dakar, and the towns that give them their names are where most people go for their papers. The map is easy to start and slow to finish, since the Gambia cuts it in two and the departments around Dakar are a few kilometres across. This page is all 46, the groups to learn them in, and the changes that make a lot of printed maps wrong.
A department is named after its main town, and most of the 46 are the size of a county: three to five to a region, with Dakar holding five and Kaffrine and Tambacounda four each. The departments are split further into arrondissements and then into communes, which the game does not ask for.
The number that matters is 46. The country had 45 departments for most of the 2010s, and a map older than 2021 has one fewer. Pikine, the dense suburb east of Dakar, was divided that year and Keur Massar was cut out of its north east. Several widely used open datasets still draw the 45, which is why this game is built from a source that was revised later.
The traps are the departments that share a name with their region, the east and the delta.
Saint Louis, Louga, Kolda and Diourbel are also regions. The department of that name is the area around the town, and it is always smaller than the region that carries the name. Saint Louis is a small coastal department at the mouth of the river, and the rest of its region is Dagana and Podor.
Linguère is not Louga. Linguère is the largest department of Senegal, a huge, near empty block of Sahelian pastureland in the interior of Louga region that reaches almost to the river. Louga itself is a modest department on the coast.
Kédougou has hills, Tambacounda has distance. The south eastern departments around Kédougou and Saraya are the greenest part of the east, with the foothills of the Fouta Djallon along the Guinean border. North of them the land flattens into dry plain, and Goudiry and Tambacounda are two of the giants.
Those groups are the ones senegal-regions uses, and older than any of the regions. They are the seven regions the country had at independence, with the two smallest, Cap-Vert and Thiès, put together, so a player who has learned the regions meets the same colours here. Every one of today's departments sits inside exactly one of those groups.
Linguère: the whole interior of Louga region, from the edge of the groundnut basin to the Ferlo, a flat, thorny pastureland where herders move cattle between boreholes. It is the largest department by a wide margin and one of the emptiest, so if the picture is open scrub and almost no villages, this is the likeliest answer.
Keur Massar: the north eastern part of what used to be Pikine, a dense and fast growing suburb of the capital. It was made a department in 2021, so it is the one most often missing from older maps, and it is one of the three smallest on the map, hemmed in by Pikine, Rufisque and Guédiawaye.
Oussouye: the south west corner of the country, between the Casamance river and the border with Guinea-Bissau, a department of mangroves and rice fields that includes Cap Skirring and the coast around it. It is one of the smallest departments outside the Dakar suburbs.
46, since Keur Massar was created in 2021. Before that Senegal had 45, and many maps and datasets still show that number. The departments are grouped into 14 regions.
The region is the top tier, headed by a governor, and the department is the tier directly under it, headed by a prefect. Every region holds between three and five departments. Below the department are the arrondissements, and below those the communes, which are the elected local councils.
Linguère, in the interior of Louga region, is the largest, and Guédiawaye, on the coast beside Dakar, is the smallest. Guédiawaye is a dense suburb of a few dozen square kilometres.
Five: Dakar, Pikine, Guédiawaye, Keur Massar and Rufisque. Together they hold close to a quarter of the country's people on a small fraction of one percent of its land.
Because both are named for the same town. Saint Louis, Louga, Kolda, Diourbel, Kaolack, Fatick, Kaffrine, Matam, Tambacounda, Kédougou, Sédhiou, Thiès, Dakar and Ziguinchor are each a region and a department with the same name, and the department is the area around the town while the region is everything its prefects share.
The Gambia is a separate country, a strip along both banks of the Gambia River that was a British colony while Senegal around it was French. It reaches the Atlantic, so it is not an enclave, but it separates Casamance, in the south, from the rest of Senegal by land.
For the tier above, try Senegal Regions. The other African trainers here are Morocco Provinces, South Africa Districts, Ghana Regions and Tunisia Governorates. For second tiers of a similar size, try Austria Districts and Bulgaria Municipalities.
