Draw South America’s countries from memory

One of these 12 outlines, picked at random. Sketch it, submit, and the score names the edge you actually remembered — then draw another South America border, or skip until you get one you think you know.

How South America adds up

These 12 outlines hold 17,737,675 km² of land and roughly 427.1 m people between them. Brazil alone is 8,515,767 km² of it — about 48% of the whole continent — while Suriname contributes 163,820 km², so the largest and smallest shapes on this sheet differ by roughly 52 to one. That spread is what makes a continent hard to practise evenly: the scoring compares filled area, so a country that occupies a tenth of the map cannot be sketched as carelessly as one that occupies a half.

4 of the 12 sit north of the equator, 8 south of it and 4 within five degrees of the line. 2 have no coastline at all, and between them they account for 8% of the land. Brazil carries the most of that burden: it touches 9 other countries in this dataset, so its shape drags half the neighbourhood with it. The groups below are the subregions our outline data carries, which is also how the country pages describe themselves.

The five hardest borders in South America

1. 01Chiledetail 21.47
2. 02Venezueladetail 4.21
3. 03Argentinadetail 3.71
4. 04Colombiadetail 3.53
5. 05Brazildetail 3.41

The list above is only the top five. Widening it to eight shows what actually drives the number: the detail score compares how much border a country carries with the land it encloses, then adds a penalty for every separate piece its outline falls into. Chile leads at 21.47 across 2 pieces, and at the other end Uruguay sits on 1.42 — the easiest shape in South America to get roughly right.

All South America countries

Every country in South America: area, population and capital

Sorted largest first, the same order the map reads. Each name opens that country's own drawing guide, where the same outline is the shape you sketch and get scored against — with the strategy notes, the sector readout and the border list that explain why it lands where it does on the difficulty scale.

How to practise South America from memory

Two routes work better than drawing countries one by one. The first is the blank map of south america: label the whole sheet, then mark what you could not place. That tells you which shapes are missing from your mental map rather than which ones you happened to click. The second is running the same continent in endless mode, which serves random well-known outlines back to back and keeps a running average, so a bad patch shows up as a trend instead of a single discouraging score.

If South America is not where you want to start, compare it against the ranked lists: the easiest borders anywhere and the hardest are both measured from this same geometry. The five-step method covers proportion and anchor points, which is what most of these shapes actually test, and the reference tables for area and capitals give you the size ordering that makes a continent fall into place.

Other continents

• Africa
• Asia
• Europe
• North America
• Oceania

Other blank maps

• World
• Europe
• Africa
• Asia
• North America
• United States

South America — questions