Blank map
Blank map of South America with all 12 countries
Every country this site counts as South American, unlabeled, drawn from the same Natural Earth borders the drawing game scores you against — not a stylised cartoon of the continent. Print it and fill it in, check the labelled answer key below, then use the table of capitals, areas, populations and neighbours for all 12 of them.
The map, without labels
Each outline sits where the country actually is, on one shared canvas framed on longitude 83° W to 34° W and latitude 56° S to 13° N. Nothing has been moved, enlarged or tidied up: Brazil bulges east exactly as far as it does, and Chile is the thin thing it always is. That is the point — a quiz map that flatters the small countries teaches you a map that does not exist.
It is drawn in Lambert azimuthal equal-area, centred on the continent, rather than the Mercator a web map uses. The difference matters most at the bottom: Mercator multiplies land area about 2.4-fold at 50° S, which is why a Mercator South America gives Tierra del Fuego far too much presence and why 2,780,400 km² of Argentina looks suspiciously like 8,515,767 km² of Brazil. Here the areas are honest, so you can read the proportions off the page instead of learning them and then unlearning them.
Two things are deliberately not on it. French Guiana has no outline, because it is a department of France and this site only scores sovereign states; and the Galápagos and Easter Island fall outside the frame, so Ecuador's island province and Chile's westernmost point are missing. Both are in the FAQ below, because on a blank map a missing shape reads as a mistake you made.
All 12 outlines are large enough to hold a name on the answer key below (12 of 12 shapes clear the label test), which makes this the most readable of the regional blank maps even on A4.
Answer key — the same map with country names
A name is printed only where the outline is wide enough to hold it without covering a neighbour. On a desktop browser, hover any outline to get its name in a tooltip; for the rest, read them off the table underneath.
How many countries are in South America? It is 12 here
The UN geoscheme does not subdivide the continent — all 12 of these countries sit in a single "South America" group — so there is no subregional table to argue over here. What there is to argue about is French Guiana, which appears on the coast between Suriname and Brazil on almost every map you have ever seen, and which is not a country. It votes in French elections and uses the euro; on this site it has no outline, because the scoring data covers sovereign states only.
Between them these 12 countries cover 17,737,675 km² — about 13% of the world's land — and 427.1 m people, of which Brazil alone supplies 211.0 m. Only 2 of the 12 have no coastline, and only Chile is drawn as more than one separate shape.
| Country | Capital | Area (km²) | Population | Land borders | Coast |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Brazil | Brasília | 8,515,767 | 211.0 m | 9 | coastal |
| Argentina | Buenos Aires | 2,780,400 | 44.9 m | 5 | coastal |
| Peru | Lima | 1,285,216 | 32.5 m | 5 | coastal |
| Colombia | Bogotá | 1,141,748 | 50.3 m | 5 | coastal |
| Bolivia | Sucre | 1,098,581 | 11.5 m | 5 | landlocked |
| Venezuela | Caracas | 916,445 | 28.5 m | 3 | coastal |
| Chile | Santiago | 756,102 | 19.0 m | 3 | coastal |
| Paraguay | Asunción | 406,752 | 7.0 m | 3 | landlocked |
| Ecuador | Quito | 276,841 | 17.4 m | 2 | coastal |
| Guyana | Georgetown | 214,969 | 783 k | 3 | coastal |
| Uruguay | Montevideo | 181,034 | 3.5 m | 2 | coastal |
| Suriname | Paramaribo | 163,820 | 581 k | 2 | coastal |
Who touches whom
South America is a compact block: unlike Asia or Africa, you can walk from any country here to any other without leaving the continent, and Uruguay has only 2 neighbours while Brazil has 9. Reading the map by adjacency rather than by alphabet is how you stop placing Paraguay in the wrong third of it — the two landlocked states are defined by who surrounds them.
| Country | Neighbours | Borders |
|---|---|---|
| Brazil | 9 | Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, Uruguay and Venezuela |
| Argentina | 5 | Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay |
| Bolivia | 5 | Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Peru |
| Colombia | 5 | Brazil, Ecuador, Panama, Peru and Venezuela |
| Peru | 5 | Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Ecuador |
| Chile | 3 | Argentina, Bolivia and Peru |
| Guyana | 3 | Brazil, Suriname and Venezuela |
| Paraguay | 3 | Argentina, Bolivia and Brazil |
| Venezuela | 3 | Brazil, Colombia and Guyana |
| Ecuador | 2 | Colombia and Peru |
| Suriname | 2 | Brazil and Guyana |
| Uruguay | 2 | Argentina and Brazil |
Which South American borders are the hardest to draw?
The detail column is measured, not guessed: it compares how much border a country carries with the area it encloses, then adds a penalty for every separate piece its outline falls into. A high number means more turns of the coast to remember. This continent splits the question in two: Chile and Venezuela are hard because of coastline, while 1,098,581 km² of Bolivia is almost pure straight-line geometry and is the 4th easiest outline here to draw — and the one people put in the wrong place.
| Country | Detail | Pieces | Area (km²) | Tier |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chile | 21.47 | 2 | 756,102 | hard |
| Venezuela | 4.21 | 1 | 916,445 | hard |
| Argentina | 3.71 | 1 | 2,780,400 | hard |
| Colombia | 3.53 | 1 | 1,141,748 | medium |
| Brazil | 3.41 | 1 | 8,515,767 | medium |
| Peru | 3.11 | 1 | 1,285,216 | medium |
| Guyana | 2.83 | 1 | 214,969 | medium |
| Ecuador | 2.39 | 1 | 276,841 | medium |
| Bolivia | 2.20 | 1 | 1,098,581 | easy |
| Paraguay | 2.03 | 1 | 406,752 | easy |
| Suriname | 1.72 | 1 | 163,820 | easy |
| Uruguay | 1.42 | 1 | 181,034 | easy |
The three that catch people out are the ones nobody practises. Guyana is a north-coast triangle with a sloped southern border and gets drawn as a square. Suriname is the smallest country here by area at 163,820 km² — a horizontal strip whose northern edge is the Marowijne and whose southern edge is the watershed — and is usually drawn the same size as Guyana. Ecuador straddles the equator, as named, but sits entirely in the Southern Hemisphere apart from a sliver of north coast, and people put it on the Pacific side of Peru rather than north of it.
Sizes worth memorising before you draw
Brazil is 3.1 times Argentina and 52 times Suriname. Four countries — Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Colombia — hold 77% of the continent's land; the other eight share the rest. Population runs on a different scale again: 211.0 m of 427.1 m people live in Brazil, and Brazil, Guyana, Suriname are the three that do not have Spanish as an official language.
| Country | In South America | In the world (of this site) | Share of the continent |
|---|---|---|---|
| Brazil | 1st of 12 | 5th of 190 | 48.0% |
| Argentina | 2nd of 12 | 8th of 190 | 15.7% |
| Peru | 3rd of 12 | 18th of 190 | 7.2% |
| Colombia | 4th of 12 | 24th of 190 | 6.4% |
| Bolivia | 5th of 12 | 26th of 190 | 6.2% |
| Venezuela | 6th of 12 | 31st of 190 | 5.2% |
| Chile | 7th of 12 | 36th of 190 | 4.3% |
| Paraguay | 8th of 12 | 58th of 190 | 2.3% |
| Ecuador | 9th of 12 | 72nd of 190 | 1.6% |
| Guyana | 10th of 12 | 82nd of 190 | 1.2% |
| Uruguay | 11th of 12 | 88th of 190 | 1.0% |
| Suriname | 12th of 12 | 90th of 190 | 0.9% |
How to use a blank map of South America
- 01
Print it, or fill it in on screen
Ctrl+P (Cmd+P on a Mac) and the outlines switch to black lines on white with no labels and no adverts — the map is styled for paper as well as for the screen. South America is the tall canvas on this site, roughly two thirds as wide as it is high, so portrait paper suits it and A4 landscape will shrink the outlines until Bolivia is the size of a thumbnail.
- 02
Draw the Andes as a line before you draw any border
The continent's organising feature is not a country, it is the mountain wall down the Pacific side. Sketch a faint line from Venezuela's north coast, along Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Chile, and the western edges of four of the twelve outlines fall out of it automatically. People who start with Brazil's east coast end up with a continent that bulges westwards into the Pacific.
- 03
Fix the three relationships that go wrong most
Bolivia sits above Paraguay and to the left of Brazil, and it has no coastline — the single most common error on a blank South America map is giving Bolivia a shore. Guyana, Suriname and the gap where French Guiana would be form a neat row north-east of Brazil. And Ecuador is small, on the Pacific, wedged between Colombia and Peru, not inland.
- 04
Name them, do not colour them in
Shading a country in teaches you very little, because the shape does the recalling for you while your pencil matches a legend. Write the name inside each outline, or say it out loud as the pen moves. If you can label a country you can find it; if you can only colour it, you have memorised a palette rather than a map.
- 05
Redraw the same map straight away
Check the answer key, mark what you got wrong, then print a second copy and fill it in again in the same sitting. The second pass is where the learning happens. In the drawing game the same loop usually adds ten to twenty accuracy points between the first attempt and the second, because the score tells you which part of the outline you lost rather than just that you lost it.
One more drill worth the time: cover the answer key and name the twelve in order of size, largest first. Brazil-Argentina-Peru-Colombia is the sequence most people can only half-recall, and it is the order the continent's outlines actually fall into. If your mental map holds Suriname at 163,820 km² and Brazil at 8,515,767 km² in the right proportions, the shapes stop fighting each other, and the rest of the continent falls into place around them.
Other blank maps
Blank map of South America — questions
How many countries are in South America?
12 on this map, which is the usual answer. The complication is French Guiana: about 83,534 km² on the north-eastern coast, and it is not on this map because it is a department of France rather than a sovereign state, so it is not one of the 190 outlines this site scores. Guyana and Suriname are the other two names people forget — both are on the map, both speak English and Dutch respectively, and school maps of "Spanish America" routinely leave them out.
Can I print this blank map of South America for free?
Yes. The outlines are inline SVG rather than a bitmap, so they stay sharp at any paper size and print as black lines on white with no labels and no adverts around them. Use your browser's print command, pick portrait orientation, and scale to fit. Nothing to download, no sign-up; the labelled answer key is further down this same page if you want a marked-up copy.
Which is the hardest South American border to draw?
Chile, and it is not close: 21.47 measured border detail, the 2nd highest of every outline on this site. Chile is roughly 4,300 km of coast and mountain wall wrapped around a strip often under 200 km wide, so its outline is mostly fjord, and its shape is the one thing people cannot reproduce. Venezuela follows at 4.21 for a different reason — a notched Caribbean coast, and the Guiana highland massif down its eastern side.
Why is Bolivia landlocked on my map but not on others?
It has been landlocked since the 1904 War of the Pacific treaty, when Chile took the Litoral province that used to reach the sea; the city of La Paz still keeps a flag with a coastline on it in protest. Bolivia at 1,098,581 km² and Paraguay at 406,752 km² are the only two countries with no coastline here — 2 of 12 — which is why drawing Bolivia's southern edge straight through Paraguay is such a common error.
Does Brazil border every other country on the map?
Not quite. Brazil has 9 land neighbours, so it touches 9 of the other 11: Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, Uruguay and Venezuela. The two it does not are Chile and Ecuador — Chile only because the long Andean wall keeps them apart, and Ecuador because Peru sits between them. Brazil alone is 48% of the continent's land and 49% of its people.
Why is there no gap where the Andes are, and why does the map look tall?
The map is honest about latitude: the frame runs from 13° N to 56° S, which makes South America the tallest of this site's framed regional canvases — about 0.69 units wide for every unit of height, against 1.50 for asia, the flattest. Mountain ranges are not borders, so the outlines here only show national edges; the Andes are the reason those edges bend the way they do, which is why drawing the ridge line first is worth more than memorising twelve shapes.
Which South American countries does the map leave out?
Three real gaps, none of them countries: French Guiana (a French department, so outside the 190-outline list), the Falkland Islands and South Georgia (British territories, and disputed), and the Galápagos and Easter Island, which belong to Ecuador and Chile but fall outside the -83° W to -34° W frame. Dependencies are not counted, which is why the Caribbean's Dutch islands never appear on a South America map either.
What is the largest country in South America?
Brazil at 8,515,767 km² — the 5th largest outline of the 190 on this whole site, and larger than the next three here put together. Argentina follows at 2,780,400 km², then Peru at 1,285,216 km². At the other end, Suriname is 163,820 km²: you can fit about 52 of them inside Brazil.
How do I practise drawing these borders rather than just naming them?
Naming is half the skill; putting a shape where it belongs is the other half. That is what the game does — you draw a country from memory, it is scaled and centred against the real border, and you get an accuracy score plus a nine-sector grid showing which part of the outline you lost. The South America index has the same 12 shapes sorted by how much detail each border carries, so you can work from forgiving outlines like Uruguay to painful ones like Chile in order.