Spanish autonomous communities, found on the map

Every one on the map

Every place listed below can be asked in this game. Places you find in a passed round drop out of your remaining pool. Grouped into 6 learning regions, matching the rounds on the Spain guide. Regions with no places in this map’s selection are omitted.

What the map tells you about each one

The paragraph the game shows when you find a place, for all 19 of the ones written by hand. Reading them first is not cheating.

Andalusia

Andalusia is about 87,000 square kilometers and has 8.5 million people, more than any other community. It presses roughly a third of the world’s olive oil, most of it in Jaén, and it holds the three great monuments of Muslim Spain: the Alhambra at Granada, the mosque at Córdoba and the Giralda at Seville.

Castile and Leon

At about 94,200 square kilometers it is the largest region in Spain and larger than Portugal, with nine provinces and only 2.4 million people in them. The Duero crosses it, Salamanca has the oldest university in the country, founded in 1218, and the language now spoken by half a billion people is named after this half of the meseta.

Castile-La Mancha

La Mancha is the largest single wine region in the world by planted area, and its windmills are the ones Don Quixote charged in 1605. Toledo is the capital, a city inside a loop of the Tagus that was the Castilian capital until 1561 and is still the seat of the Spanish primate.

Aragon

Aragon was a crown of its own until Ferdinand married Isabella of Castile in 1469, and it brought Catalonia, Valencia, the Balearics, Sardinia, Sicily and Naples with it. The Ebro runs through the middle of it, and about half of its 1.3 million people live in Zaragoza on that river.

Catalonia

Catalonia has 7.9 million people and produces about a fifth of Spanish output. Catalan is a separate Romance language rather than a dialect of Spanish, and it was banned from public life under Franco. The independence referendum of 1 October 2017 was held against a court ruling, and the leaders who called it were jailed or left the country.

Galicia

Galicia is green and rainy in a country that mostly is not, and its coast is cut into drowned valleys called rías. Santiago de Compostela has been the end of a pilgrimage since the ninth century, and Vigo lands more fish by value than any other port in Europe. Galician and Portuguese were one language until the Middle Ages.

Community of Madrid

The region is about 8,000 square kilometers with 6.9 million people in it, and the city inside it sits at 667 meters, which makes it the highest capital in the European Union. Philip II moved the court here in 1561 for the reason the region exists: it is the middle, and the roads still radiate from a stone in the Puerta del Sol.

Valencian Community

A coastal strip of 5.1 million people that grows most of the oranges Spain exports and invented paella, which comes from the rice fields of the Albufera lagoon south of the city. Its own festival, the Fallas, ends every March with the burning of hundreds of enormous satirical figures in the streets.

Basque Country

Basque is not related to Spanish, French or any other living language, and was spoken here before the Romans arrived. The region collects its own taxes under an arrangement older than the constitution, and Bilbao’s Guggenheim, opened in 1997, turned a dying steel city into the standard example of what a museum can do to a place.

Canary Islands

The islands are about 1,800km from Madrid and 100km from Morocco, and they are volcanic: Teide on Tenerife is 3,715 meters and the highest point in Spain. The 2021 eruption on La Palma ran for 85 days and buried around 1,200 buildings. Two cities share the regional capital, which alternates between them.

Balearic Islands

Mallorca, Menorca, Ibiza and Formentera hold 1.2 million residents and take around 16 million visitors a year. Menorca was British for most of the eighteenth century, which is why it has a naval hospital, gin and a word for a window sash. Ibiza has been a nightclub island since the 1970s and a Phoenician port since 654 BC.

Extremadura

The emptiest region in Spain, at about 26 people per square kilometer, and the one that produced the conquistadors: Cortés, Pizarro, Orellana and Balboa were all born within about 200km of each other here. Its oak pasture, the dehesa, is what the black Iberian pigs eat, and it is one of the largest farmed woodland systems in Europe.

Asturias

The one corner of the peninsula the Muslim conquest never held. A small force turned back an army at Covadonga in about 722, and the kingdom that grew from it began the long push south, which is why the heir to the Spanish throne has been Prince or Princess of Asturias since 1388. It was a coal and steel region and is now the fastest ageing one.

Cantabria

The painted cave at Altamira is here, with bison drawn on its ceiling between about 36,000 and 15,000 years ago. It was found in 1879 by a girl of eight whose father was digging in the floor, dismissed as a forgery for twenty years, and closed to general visitors in 2002 because human breath was destroying the paint.

Navarre

A kingdom that straddled the Pyrenees and kept its own laws long after Castile annexed the southern half in 1512. It still raises its own taxes. Pamplona is the capital, and the bulls run through it for eight mornings each July, which Hemingway put in a novel in 1926 and made the busiest week in Spain.

Region of Murcia

The driest corner of the country and one of the most intensively farmed, watered since 1979 by a canal that carries the Tagus 290km south into the Segura. The Mar Menor on its coast is the largest saltwater lagoon in Europe, and after fertilizer runoff killed thousands of tonnes of fish it was granted legal personhood in 2022, the first ecosystem in Europe to have it.

La Rioja

About 5,000 square kilometers and 320,000 people, on the terraces of the upper Ebro. The wine took its modern form in the 1860s, when phylloxera destroyed the French vineyards and Bordeaux winemakers crossed the Pyrenees looking for grapes and stayed to teach barrel ageing. The earliest known written Castilian is in a monastery here.

Ceuta

Eighteen and a half square kilometers on the Moroccan coast, with 84,000 people. Portugal took it in 1415, it passed to Spain in 1580 and stayed Spanish when the two crowns separated in 1640. It is one of two land borders the European Union has with Africa, and the fence around it is one of the most watched frontiers in the world.

Melilla

Twelve square kilometers and 86,000 people, Spanish since 1497, three years before Spain finished taking Granada. It has the second largest collection of modernist architecture in the country after Barcelona, most of it by one architect, Enrique Nieto, who trained under Gaudí and spent his career here.

How this one works

The other maps of Spain

Denmark has the same map in Danish regions. France has the same map in French regions. United Kingdom has the same map in UK regions. Italy has the same map in Italian regions. All three together on the Spain atlas page, the country itself on the Spain guide, and the other two hundred on the world map.