Spanish rivers, reservoirs and seas, 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. Shared rivers and seas appear in one learning group, even when they cross regional boundaries.

What the map tells you about each one

The paragraph the game shows when you find a place, for all 16 of the ones written by hand. Reading them first is not cheating.

Ebro

The Ebro is about 930km long, the longest river lying entirely inside Spain, and the only large one that reaches the Mediterranean. Its delta below Tortosa is 320 square kilometers of rice fields and lagoons, and it is sinking: the dams upstream hold back the silt that used to build it.

Tagus

At about 1,007km it is the longest river on the peninsula, and it ends in Lisbon rather than in Spain. It loops around three sides of Toledo, which is why the city is where it is, and a canal built in the 1970s takes part of its headwaters 290km south to irrigate the driest corner of the country.

Duero

The Duero is about 897km long and drains the whole northern meseta. Its Spanish stretch grows Ribera del Duero and its Portuguese one, where it is called the Douro, grows port. For 120km it is the border, running through a gorge called the Arribes that is 200 meters deep in places.

Guadiana

About 818km long, and for part of its course it is not on the surface at all: it sinks into the limestone of La Mancha and comes back up 30km later at the springs called the Ojos del Guadiana, which stopped flowing in the 1980s when the aquifer under them was pumped for irrigation.

Guadalquivir

The name is Arabic for the great river, and it is the only navigable one in Spain: ships reach Seville 80km inland. Its mouth is the Doñana marshes, the largest wetland reserve in Europe and the wintering ground for hundreds of thousands of birds, and Magellan sailed from a town at the river mouth in 1519.

Miño

About 340km long and the main river of Galicia, with the last 75km of it as the Portuguese border. The terraced valleys along it grow albariño on one bank and vinho verde on the other, which are the same grape written in two spellings of what used to be one language.

Segre

The largest tributary of the Ebro, about 265km long, and it rises in France: the Cerdanya valley at its head is split by a border drawn in 1659 that left a Spanish town, Llívia, stranded a kilometer inside France, where it still is.

Esla

The Duero’s largest tributary by volume, about 285km long, running down from the Cantabrian mountains. The reservoir at its head, Riaño, was filled in 1987 over the top of nine villages whose people were moved out under police escort, and the church towers still show when the water is low.

Buendía Reservoir

One of the two reservoirs known as the sea of Castile, holding about 1,600 cubic hectometers on a tributary of the Tagus. It is where the canal to the southeast starts, so a dry year here is an argument between four regions about who owns the water before it has fallen.

Orellana Reservoir

Built on the Guadiana in the 1950s to irrigate the Vegas Altas around it, and it is a reminder of what the map does not have: Natural Earth names no natural lake anywhere in Spain. Almost every piece of standing water in the country was built, most of it between 1950 and 1980.

Atlantic Ocean

Spain faces the Atlantic on two coasts that could not be less alike: the green, rainy northwest, and the sandbars of the southwest where the fleets sailed for the Americas. The islands off Africa are in it too, which is why they were the last stop for every ship heading west, Columbus included.

Mediterranean Sea

Spain has about 1,600km of Mediterranean coast, and nearly everything that has happened to the country arrived along it: Phoenicians, Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans and the Muslim armies of 711. The sea is nearly tideless, which is why the Roman harbors on it are still where they were.

Bay of Biscay

Spanish calls it the Cantabrian Sea, and it is famous for weather: the fetch runs the length of the Atlantic and meets a continental shelf that shoals fast, which turns swell into the kind of sea that sinks ships. The Basque whaling fleets worked out of it and reached Newfoundland by the 1520s.

Balearic Sea

The basin between the mainland and the islands, about 800 meters deep on average and separated from the rest of the Mediterranean by the shallow ridge the islands stand on. The Ebro empties into it, and the current turns south down the coast, which is why the delta reaches that way.

Alboran Sea

The Mediterranean loses more water to evaporation than its rivers put back, so Atlantic water pours in through the strait at the western end and spreads out here in two great gyres. That inflow makes this the coldest and least salty corner of the sea, and the only part of it with a resident population of common dolphins.

Strait of Gibraltar

Fourteen kilometers wide at its narrowest and the only natural opening the Mediterranean has. About five and a half million years ago it closed, and the sea behind it dried to salt flats over roughly a thousand years; when the Atlantic broke back through, the basin may have refilled in as little as two years.

How this one works

The other maps of Spain

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