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Can you locate all 81 provinces of Turkey?
Can you place all 342 Dutch gemeenten?
Can you locate all 12 provinces of the Netherlands?
Can you place all 101 departments of France?
Spain is cut into provinces, and it has been cut the same way since 1833: one set of lines that the post office, the phone network, the old number plates and the statistics office all still use. Learn them and half the clues in the country resolve to a place, because almost anything with a number on it in Spain is numbered by province. This page is the whole set, and the game asks you to put each name where it belongs, in English or the way it is written at home.
A provincia is not a government. It is a division of the state, drawn up in November 1833 by Javier de Burgos to give a centralising government something regular to administer, and its borders have barely moved since: the same map you learn here was being printed before photography. Forty-nine were drawn then. The fiftieth arrived in 1927, when the single Canary province was split between Las Palmas and Santa Cruz de Tenerife, and that is the last time this map changed.
Above the provinces sit the seventeen autonomous communities, which are the real tier of government: they run the hospitals, the schools and the police in some cases, and they are what a Spaniard means by where they are from. The communities were built out of provinces rather than across them, so every province belongs to exactly one, and seven communities are a single province wearing two hats. Ceuta and Melilla, on the African coast, are neither: they are autonomous cities, a status nothing else in Spain holds, and they are not in this game.
Most provinces are named after their capital, which makes the map easier than it looks: find the city and you have the province. The exceptions are the ones that were already something before 1833 and kept their own name, so their capital is called something else entirely, and those are the eight that catch people out.
The province is also the most legible thing on any Spanish street. A postcode begins with its province number, counted alphabetically from 01 to 50. A landline area code is provincial. A road numbered with letters and a dash usually carries a provincial or community prefix. Number plates named the province outright until 2000 and plenty of those cars are still on the road, and the language on the signage narrows it further, since Galician, Basque, Catalan and Valencian each belong to a handful of these.
The Castilian nine are where runs go wrong, because none of them has a shape worth remembering and the names give nothing away. The order that helps is the ring: Valladolid in the middle with Palencia above it, then clockwise Burgos, Soria, Segovia, Ávila, Salamanca, Zamora and León.
The other reliable traps are pairs. La Rioja is the small one on the Ebro and it is not Basque, and Álava, which sits immediately north of it and looks much the same, is. Cuenca and Guadalajara are both east of Madrid, and Guadalajara is the northern of the two. Cáceres and Badajoz are the Extremaduran pair, north and south. Castellón is a province on the coast and Castile is half the country. And León is a province, a city and a kingdom that has not existed for eight hundred years, none of which is the country in Central America.
These seven groups are the NUTS 1 regions, the top level of the statistical division Spain and Eurostat publish in, and they are made of whole autonomous communities, so no province is split between two of them. They are not a tier of government and nobody uses them in conversation, but they are the grouping the numbers come in, and they cut the fifty into pieces a person can learn one at a time. Each group can be played on its own from the start dialog, so the Canaries are a two question drill and the Centre is a real one.
The name in brackets is the province as it is written in Spain, which is the form on the road signs, and what the game shows if you turn on the local name in the start dialog. Most of the fifty are the same word either way. Where they differ it is usually because the province is in a place with a second official language, and the Galician, Basque or Catalan form is the legal one.
Three provinces in the space most of this map gives to one, and the corner where a run is most likely to lose a point. Two of them are on the coast, Bizkaia around Bilbao and Gipuzkoa against the French border, and this is the third, the inland one on the Ebro side of the hills. Its capital is Vitoria-Gasteiz, which is also the seat of the whole Basque government, so the province and the city share no name at all.
The western half of the Canaries: Tenerife, La Palma, La Gomera and El Hierro, with La Graciosa and the eastern islands belonging to Las Palmas instead. The archipelago is a thousand kilometres southwest of the mainland, off the Sahara, so this map moves it up into the empty sea below Andalusia and draws a line to say so. It was one province until 1927, and splitting it in two settled an argument between the islands that had been running for a century.
Galicia is four provinces, and three of them have a coast. This is the one that does not: the southeastern corner against Portugal, in the valley of the Miño, and the answer to the question of which Galician province is landlocked. Its capital carries the same name and is built on hot springs that the Romans bathed in, and probably takes its name from them.
The largest province in Spain by area, roughly the size of Slovenia, filling the southern half of Extremadura along the Portuguese border, with Cáceres above it as the second largest. Between them they are a tenth of the country and two of its emptiest corners, which is why a photo taken in either one tends to offer nothing but dehesa, holm oaks and pigs.
50. Ceuta and Melilla are often counted alongside them, and the postcode and statistical systems give them numbers 51 and 52, but they are autonomous cities rather than provinces and this game asks about the 50.
The community is the government and the province is the administrative division underneath it. There are 17 communities, each made of one or more whole provinces, and they hold real power over health, education and much else. The provinces are older, dating from 1833, and survive mostly as the unit everything is numbered by: postcodes, area codes, statistics and, until 2000, number plates. Seven communities consist of a single province: Asturias, Cantabria, La Rioja, Madrid, Murcia, Navarre and the Balearic Islands.
Because Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and Santa Cruz de Tenerife spent the nineteenth century arguing about which of them was the capital of the islands. The single Canary province created in 1833 was divided in two in 1927, giving each city a province of its own: Santa Cruz de Tenerife takes the western islands and Las Palmas the eastern ones. The community still has two capitals, and its presidency alternates between the two cities.
Their capital city, in 42 of the 50 cases, which is why finding the city places the province. The eight exceptions were territories with names of their own before the provinces were drawn: Álava, Asturias, the Balearic Islands, Bizkaia, Cantabria, Gipuzkoa, La Rioja and Navarre. Their capitals are Vitoria-Gasteiz, Oviedo, Palma, Bilbao, Santander, San Sebastián, Logroño and Pamplona.
Look for a number. A postcode on a shopfront or a van begins with the province number, counted alphabetically from 01 for Álava to 50 for Zaragoza, and a landline number beginning 9 carries a provincial area code. A car registered before September 2000 has the province's letters on the plate, and there are still plenty about. After that, the language on the signs narrows it to a region, the road numbering prefix names the community or the province that maintains the road, and the landscape does the rest.
Badajoz is the largest by area at about 21,800 square kilometres, with Cáceres second, so Extremadura's two provinces are the biggest in the country. Gipuzkoa is the smallest at under 2,000. By population Madrid is far ahead of everything else with around seven million people, and Soria is the emptiest, with fewer than a hundred thousand in a province larger than Madrid.
In November 1833, by a decree drafted by Javier de Burgos, which replaced the old kingdoms and lordships with 49 provinces of roughly comparable size, each named after its capital except where an older name stuck. The only change since was the division of the Canaries into two provinces in 1927. The 1833 borders were themselves a redraw of a French-inspired attempt from the Napoleonic period, and they were deliberately drawn so that no provincial capital was more than a day's travel from anywhere in its province.
The same fifty provinces answer a different question in Spain Dialing Codes, which is worth playing straight after this one. More European maps in this shape: Germany States, Germany Districts and Poland Voivodeships. Further afield, Argentina Provinces and Japan Prefectures ask exactly the same thing of two other countries.
