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Can you locate all 81 provinces of Turkey?
Can you locate all 20 regions of Italy?
Can you place all 400 German Landkreise and kreisfreie Städte?
Can you locate all 12 nations and regions of the United Kingdom?
Spain is governed in two layers that most visitors only half see: the provinces, which date from 1833 and are what postcodes and phone numbers follow, and the autonomous communities above them, which are what a Spaniard means by where they are from and which run the hospitals, the schools and in several cases the police. This page is the whole set of communities, and the game asks you to put each name where it belongs, in English or the way it is written at home.
The communities were built after Franco, out of the 1978 constitution, which let any group of neighbouring provinces apply to become one. Catalonia, the Basque Country and Galicia, the three with their own languages and a recent history of self-government, went first, and by 1983 every province in the country had joined one. The result is seventeen communities and, on the African coast, the two autonomous cities of Ceuta and Melilla, which hold a status of their own and sit in this game alongside the seventeen.
The map is not even. Castile and León is larger than Portugal and has nine provinces; La Rioja is a single valley and has one. Seven communities are a single province wearing two hats: Asturias, Cantabria, La Rioja, Madrid, Murcia, Navarre and the Balearic Islands. For those the community and the province are the same shape, so learning one gives you the other for free.
Two of them, the Basque Country and Navarre, collect their own taxes under regimes that predate the constitution, which is why they are the two with the most unusual relationship to Madrid. The Canary Islands are the only community drawn somewhere other than where it is: a thousand kilometres southwest of the mainland, off the Sahara, they are moved up into the empty sea below Andalusia on this map and fenced off with a line.
The two traps are names, not shapes. Castile and León and Castile-La Mancha differ by one word and are neighbours, and the way out is that León is the northern one, in the corner next to Galicia and Asturias. And Ceuta and Melilla are drawn at the size of a pinprick on a map of the whole country: look for them on the African side of the strait, one at its western mouth and one a long way east.
These seven groups are the NUTS 1 regions that Spain and Eurostat publish their statistics in. They are made of whole communities, so none is split, and they are the same seven groups the provinces game uses. Each can be played on its own from the start dialog, so the Canary Islands are a one question drill and the Northeast is a real one.
The name in brackets is the community as it is written in Spain, which is what the game shows if you turn on the local name in the start dialog. Where it differs it is because the community has a second official language: Catalunya, Illes Balears, Canarias and Comunitat Valenciana are the legal forms.
Madrid is a community with one province and almost no outline of its own: it is the small shape in the dead centre of the plateau, entirely enclosed by Castile and León to the north and Castile-La Mancha to the south and east. Its one province was part of New Castile until 1983, and it became a community of its own rather than joining Castile-La Mancha, which is why the capital is not inside either of its neighbours.
Ceuta is a Spanish city on the African side of the Strait of Gibraltar, about eighteen square kilometres, and an autonomous city rather than part of any community. On the map it is the tiny shape opposite Gibraltar, one of the two that have a tap area added so a finger can actually land on them.
Two provinces, Las Palmas and Santa Cruz de Tenerife, make up the Canary Islands, and as a community they are one answer. The archipelago is moved up into the sea below Andalusia on this map, which costs the mainland nothing and lets it be drawn as large as the window can hold it.
17, plus two autonomous cities, Ceuta and Melilla, which are counted alongside them in this game for 19 in all.
The community is the government and the province is the older administrative division underneath it. Communities hold real power over health, education and much else, and each is made of one or more whole provinces. There are 50 provinces. Seven communities consist of a single province: Asturias, Cantabria, La Rioja, Madrid, Murcia, Navarre and the Balearic Islands.
Castile and León is the largest by area, at about 94,000 square kilometres, and Andalusia the most populous. Of the 17 communities, La Rioja is the smallest by both measures. The two autonomous cities are far smaller still: Ceuta covers under twenty square kilometres and Melilla about twelve.
They were Spanish cities long before the communities existed and are too small to be a region of their own, so they were granted autonomous city status in 1995 instead, with a city council that has some of the powers of a community.
Catalonia, the Balearic Islands and the Valencian Community have Catalan (called Valencian in the last), Galicia has Galician, and the Basque Country and part of Navarre have Basque. Spanish is official everywhere.
The same map one level down is Spain Provinces, and the phone numbers are in Spain Dialing Codes. More European maps in this shape: Germany States, Italy Regions and France Regions.
