How many countries are in Latin America?

This quiz uses the standard definition of 20 countries: Mexico, the seven Central American nations except Belize, plus Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti in the Caribbean, and the ten Latin countries of South America including Brazil.

Why are Belize, Guyana, and Suriname excluded?

Latin America is defined by Romance-language heritage. Belize and Guyana are primarily English-speaking and Suriname is Dutch-speaking, so they appear on the map as context but are not quiz targets.

Is Latin America the same as South America?

No — Latin America also includes Mexico, most of Central America, and three Caribbean nations, while excluding the non-Latin countries of South America. Our South America quiz covers that continent's full 12 countries.

How many countries are in the Latin America map quiz?

Twenty. Mexico; six of Central America's seven countries, namely Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama; three Caribbean nations, Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic; and ten of South America's twelve, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay, Chile, Argentina and Uruguay. That is the standard list of Latin American sovereign states.

Why are Belize, Guyana and Suriname not included?

Latin America is defined by Romance-language heritage. Belize and Guyana are English-speaking, legacies of British Honduras and British Guiana, and Suriname is Dutch-speaking, so none of the three qualifies. All three are drawn on the quiz map as context but are never named as targets. The same reasoning excludes Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago and the rest of the Anglophone Caribbean.

Is Mexico part of Latin America or part of North America?

Both, because the two labels answer different questions. Mexico sits on the North American continent, and it is Latin American because Spanish is its national language. Continental membership is about landmass; Latin America is about colonial language heritage. Central America is usually counted as part of North America as well, but Mexico is the only target here drawn from north of it, and the northernmost of the twenty.

Which countries do players miss most often in this quiz?

The Central American chain and Hispaniola cause the most trouble. Honduras and Nicaragua are easy to swap, Guatemala and Honduras blur together, and El Salvador and Costa Rica are hard to place by shape alone. On the islands, Haiti and the Dominican Republic get reversed: Haiti holds the western third of Hispaniola, the Dominican Republic the eastern two-thirds. In South America, Paraguay and Uruguay are confused by name rather than position.

Is the quiz free, and is my score saved?

The quiz is free, runs in your browser, and needs no signup or account. Your best score is stored locally on the device you play on, so you can return and try to beat it. Nothing is uploaded and there is no shared leaderboard. Clearing your browser's site data, using private browsing, or switching to a different device or browser will reset the saved best.

Latin America Map Quiz — All 20 Countries | Free Geography Game

Loading interactive map…

The Latin America map quiz spans two continents and 20 countries — everywhere in the Americas where Spanish, Portuguese, or French grew from colonial roots into national languages. The run starts with Mexico, threads through the seven countries of Central America, jumps to the Caribbean for Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti, then covers the ten Latin countries of South America from Venezuela down to Argentina and Chile. That mix is exactly what makes this quiz interesting: you need Central American precision, Caribbean island knowledge, and South American scale awareness in a single round. Note what is not here — Belize, Guyana, and Suriname sit inside the map but are English- and Dutch-speaking, so they stay as context rather than targets. Click the named country to score; correct answers lock in green, and after two misses the quiz reveals the answer so the borders stick. It is the natural next step after the Central America and South America quizzes, and solid prep for the Spanish-speaking countries challenge.

How to play

The quiz names one of the 20 countries — find it and click it on the map.
A correct click locks in green. A wrong click flashes red, and after two misses the quiz highlights the answer for you.
You score a point for every first-try answer. Finish all 20, check your score, then replay — the order reshuffles every round.

The Latin America map quiz names a country and asks you to find it on an unlabelled map: twenty territories, from Mexico at the top of the set to Argentina and Chile at the bottom. Click the right outline and it locks in. The quiz runs in the browser, costs nothing, needs no signup, and keeps your best score on the device you play on. The article below explains how the twenty-country set is defined, gives a four-pass method for learning the shapes, and works through the pairs that cost most players their points.

Why this quiz has twenty countries when other lists say thirty-three

Latin America is a language category given a map. The twenty countries here are the sovereign states of the Americas whose national language descends from Latin by way of colonial rule: Spanish in eighteen, Portuguese in Brazil, French and Haitian Creole in Haiti. The label itself is a nineteenth-century invention. The words “Latin” and “America” were first combined in print in 1856, by the Chilean politician Francisco Bilbao at a conference in Paris, with the Colombian writer José María Torres Caicedo using the phrase at almost the same moment in his poem “The Two Americas”.

The arithmetic of twenty is worth doing once; it is the fastest way to remember who is in the set. One country from the North American mainland: Mexico. Six of Central America's seven: Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama. Three from the Caribbean: Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Ten of South America's twelve: Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay, Chile, Argentina and Uruguay. Central America is normally counted as part of North America too; splitting it out here just makes the counting clearer. One plus six plus three plus ten is twenty.

The excluded neighbours are drawn on the map but never called. Belize was administered as British Honduras from 1862 and became independent in 1981; it is English-speaking, and it is the seventh Central American country this quiz leaves out. Guyana is English-speaking too, a legacy of British Guiana, and Suriname is Dutch-speaking, which is why South America contributes ten targets rather than twelve.

Two awkward cases explain most of the disagreement. French Guiana is French-speaking, but it is an overseas department of France rather than a sovereign country, so it cannot appear on a list of nations. Puerto Rico is Spanish-speaking and almost always counted as culturally Latin American, yet it is a United States territory, not an independent state; quizzes advertising twenty-one countries have usually added it. Widen the frame to the United Nations grouping “Latin America and the Caribbean” and the count reaches thirty-three sovereign countries, with a further nineteen dependent territories alongside them.

For scale, Latin America as defined here covers roughly 20.1 million square kilometres, more land than Russia, and holds over 650 million people, more than the European Union. That it reads as a single region is a fact about language, not physical geography: the set spans two continents, reaching from north of the Tropic of Cancer, in Mexico, to Cape Horn at the southern tip of Chile.

A four-pass method for learning the twenty shapes

Trying to learn twenty outlines at once produces a blur; learning them in four fixed passes, always in the same order, produces a map. Pass one is the three anchors: Mexico, Brazil and Argentina, the largest members of the set, each pinning down a different corner. Brazil alone covers roughly half of South America's land area, 8,510,346 square kilometres and the fifth-largest country in the world, and it borders nine countries, which is every South American state except Ecuador and Chile.

Pass two is the Central American ladder: six rungs read north-west to south-east, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama. Say them until the order is automatic, because on an unlabelled map the order is the answer. Guatemala is the block that touches Mexico. El Salvador never reaches the Caribbean, and at 21,041 square kilometres it is the smallest of the seven Central American states. Honduras is broad across the Caribbean side with only a narrow Pacific window on the Gulf of Fonseca. Nicaragua, at 130,370 square kilometres the largest country in Central America, carries the two big lakes. Costa Rica narrows the isthmus, and Panama bends away east.

Pass three is the Caribbean trio, which is really only two islands. Cuba is the long, thin one to the north-west, 110,860 square kilometres and the largest country in the Caribbean by area, lying closer to Florida than to South America. South-east of it is Hispaniola, the second-largest island in the Caribbean at 76,192 square kilometres, carrying two of the quiz's twenty on its own: Haiti holds the western 36.4 per cent, the side with two long peninsulas closing around a gulf, and the Dominican Republic the eastern 63.6 per cent.

Pass four is the South American ring, walked clockwise from the top left. Colombia, then Venezuela along the Caribbean; skip the three Guianas, which are drawn but never asked; then Brazil down the Atlantic, Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile turning the corner at the bottom. Come back up the Pacific through Peru and Ecuador to Colombia and the loop closes, leaving two countries stranded in the middle: Bolivia and Paraguay, the only landlocked countries in the entire Americas. If the shape you are hunting has no coast anywhere, it is one of that pair.

Because this quiz asks you to click an outline rather than choose from options, hesitation costs nothing and a wild guess gains nothing. Before clicking, trace the border of the country you think it is with your eye: where it starts, where it stops, which coast it owns, which giant it leans against. Play the four passes as separate mental rounds even though the quiz shuffles all twenty together; most players find one pass carrying nearly all their errors.

The pairs that cost you points, and the single tell for each

Almost every miss comes from a pair rather than from a blank, and the Central American pairs cause the most damage. Guatemala and Honduras occupy similar space in the mind, and the tell is Mexico: Guatemala is the only country in this quiz that borders Mexico from the south. Honduras and Nicaragua sit directly on top of one another, and the tell is water, because Nicaragua holds two large lakes in its west and Honduras nothing of that size. El Salvador gets confused with whichever small shape is nearby, and the tell is the Caribbean: it is the only Central American country without a Caribbean coastline.

Costa Rica and Panama are the last pair on the isthmus and the most reliably mixed up. Costa Rica is the thicker of the two and runs broadly north-west to south-east. Panama is the thin S that turns and lies almost east to west, which produces the region's best-known geographical surprise: a ship crossing the Panama Canal from the Caribbean towards the Pacific travels south-east, and the Pacific entrance ends up east of the Caribbean one. Panama City sits at about 79.53 degrees west, Colón at the Caribbean end at about 79.90. If the shape is lying sideways, it is Panama.

On the islands the pair is Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and the tell is direction: Haiti is the western third of Hispaniola, the Dominican Republic the eastern two-thirds. For a second check, Haiti's share of the island is the smaller at 27,747 square kilometres against 48,445, and its coastline is far more indented, with two long arms reaching west around the Gulf of Gonâve. Cuba is rarely mistaken for Hispaniola: it lies further north and west and is a single continuous island rather than a shared one.

South America supplies four more pairs. Ecuador and Peru: Ecuador is the small country straddling the equator that gave it its name, Peru the much larger one immediately south. Bolivia and Paraguay, the two landlocked states: Bolivia is far bigger at 1,098,581 square kilometres, the fifth-largest country in South America, pressed against the Andes in the west, while Paraguay is smaller and further south-east, wedged between Brazil, Bolivia and Argentina. Uruguay and Paraguay are confused by name rather than shape, and the tell is the sea: Uruguay sits on the Atlantic at the mouth of the Río de la Plata, Paraguay has no coast at all.

The last pair is Colombia and Venezuela, and the tell is the Pacific. Colombia is the only South American country with coastline on both the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean; Venezuela has Caribbean coast only. Chile, by contrast, is nobody's confusion. At 4,270 kilometres from north to south, averaging just 177 kilometres in width and carrying 6,435 kilometres of coastline, it is the most instantly identifiable outline in the Americas, worth clicking without deliberation so the time you save goes to the isthmus.

The history written into these borders

Several of these borders are recent enough that the people who drew them have living grandchildren. Panama was a department of Colombia until 3 November 1903, when it separated with United States backing. The canal that motivated the separation formally opened on 15 August 1914 and passed into Panamanian control at noon on 31 December 1999. The 82-kilometre waterway cutting the country in two is the reason Panama exists as a separate state at all; its border with Colombia is the old departmental line, inherited rather than negotiated. The country is younger than the modern Olympic Games.

Hispaniola is the only island in this quiz carrying two countries, and the split predates both. Spain formally ceded the western third of the island to France under the Treaty of Ryswick in 1697, creating the French colony of Saint-Domingue. That colony became Haiti when it won independence from France in 1804, at the end of a revolution that had run since 1791. The Dominican Republic's independence, declared on 27 February 1844, was won not from Spain but from Haiti, which had occupied the eastern side since 1822.

Bolivia's outline records a loss. Until the War of the Pacific, fought from 1879 to 1883, Bolivia held a stretch of Pacific coast; Chile occupied the mineral-rich territory and kept it, and Bolivia has been landlocked ever since. It still maintains a naval force, which patrols Lake Titicaca and its navigable rivers. Its capital arrangement is a further quirk worth knowing: Sucre is the constitutional capital and seat of the judiciary, while La Paz, at roughly 3,650 metres, holds the executive and the legislature and is the highest administrative capital in the world.

Brazil's dominance of the map is a Portuguese inheritance. The 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas drew a meridian dividing Spanish and Portuguese claims in the New World, and Portuguese settlement pushed far west of that line over the following centuries, which is why one country covers about half a continent and is the only Portuguese-speaking country in the Americas, with a population above 213 million. Its capital is a twentieth-century decision too: Brasília was inaugurated in 1960 as a purpose-built inland capital, replacing Rio de Janeiro.

One border inside the quiz frame is still being argued in court. Venezuela claims 159,500 square kilometres west of the Essequibo River, the bulk of Guyana's territory, rejecting an arbitral award made in 1899 and citing the Geneva Agreement signed on 17 February 1966. Guyana took the case to the International Court of Justice, which ruled on 18 December 2020 that it had jurisdiction and in April 2023 rejected Venezuela's objection to the case being heard; Venezuela then held a referendum on the territory on 3 December 2023. Guyana is not a target here, but its outline is on your screen.

All twenty countries, grouped by how often they are missed

Five are easy, thanks to an unmistakable outline or an unmistakable position. Mexico is the funnel at the top of the set and the only member drawn from the North American mainland. Brazil is the eastern mass of South America and touches nearly everything around it. Argentina is the long wedge running down the Atlantic side to the far south. Chile is the ribbon on the Pacific side, 4,270 kilometres long and averaging 177 kilometres wide. Cuba is the long island lying north-west of the rest of the Caribbean.

Six sit in the middle, recognisable but positional: you find them by their neighbours rather than by their silhouette. Colombia occupies the north-western corner of South America across 1,141,748 square kilometres and is the only country there with both a Caribbean and a Pacific coast. Venezuela runs east from Colombia along the Caribbean. Peru is the large Pacific-facing country between Ecuador and Chile. Bolivia is the landlocked interior pressed against the Andes. Panama closes the isthmus and lies sideways. Guatemala is the Central American country that borders Mexico.

Nine are hard, and six of those nine are Central American or Caribbean. El Salvador is the smallest of the whole quiz set at 21,041 square kilometres and the only Central American state with no Caribbean coast. Honduras sits directly above Nicaragua with a wide Caribbean coastline and only a narrow Pacific one. Nicaragua is the largest Central American country at 130,370 square kilometres and the one holding the big lakes. Costa Rica lies between Nicaragua and Panama, covers about 51,180 square kilometres, and abolished its military on 1 December 1948, a decision written into Article 12 of the constitution adopted the following year. Haiti and the Dominican Republic share Hispaniola, west and east.

The remaining three hard ones are South American. Ecuador is small, sits astride the equator that named it, and holds Quito at 2,850 metres, the capital city closest to the equator and, when Bolivia's capital is taken to be Sucre, the highest capital in the world. Paraguay is the landlocked country south-east of Bolivia, bounded by Brazil, Bolivia and Argentina. Uruguay is the second-smallest sovereign country in South America after Suriname at 176,215 square kilometres, with about 3.5 million people, nearly two million of them in the Montevideo metropolitan area.

Counted up, that is five easy, six medium and nine hard. The anchors and the middle six come almost free, and the last seven or eight points all have to be earned in Central America and on Hispaniola. Since the quiz stores your best result on the device you played on, the target is a specific one: clear the six hard Central American and Caribbean entries in a single round before worrying about speed.

Where to go once you can clear all twenty

A clean round of twenty is a plateau, not a summit, and the best next move is to narrow rather than widen. The Central America quiz on this site isolates the isthmus, where nearly all the difficulty in this set actually lives; running it repeatedly is the quickest way to fix the Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua sequence and to stop El Salvador and Costa Rica trading places. The South America quiz does the same for the continent and adds the two countries this one leaves out, Guyana and Suriname, taking the count from ten to the full twelve.

The other direction is to change what the map asks of you. Capitals quizzes work the opposite way round: instead of clicking a territory, you are shown a country highlighted on the map and choose its capital from four options, so the skill trained is recall of a name rather than recognition of a shape. The Spanish-speaking countries capitals quiz is the natural companion, because eighteen of these twenty countries appear in it, every member except Brazil, whose language is Portuguese, and Haiti, whose languages are French and Haitian Creole. It adds Spain, Equatorial Guinea and Puerto Rico to reach twenty-one.

Going wider still, the world capitals quiz picks up seven countries from this set, Mexico, Cuba, Brazil, Colombia, Peru, Chile and Argentina, among the rest of the world. Brasília, Havana and Buenos Aires feel obvious inside a regional quiz and considerably less obvious when the previous question was Abuja and the next one is Ankara.

Whichever you choose next, space the repetitions out. Playing the same quiz five times in ten minutes produces a flattering score and little retention; once a day for five days produces a worse first score and a far better fifth. Because the quiz runs entirely in the browser and needs no signup, there is no friction in coming back to it. The only thing kept is your best score, stored locally on that device, so switching browser, using private browsing or clearing site data starts the number again from zero.

Finally, do the one thing a quiz cannot do for you, which is to read the map when nothing is being asked. Spend two minutes tracing the Central American chain from Guatemala down to Panama, then the Andes from Colombia to Cape Horn, then the border across Hispaniola. Recognition and recall are different skills, and clicking under time pressure trains only the first of them.

Latin America map quiz — FAQ

How many countries are in Latin America?: This quiz uses the standard definition of 20 countries: Mexico, the seven Central American nations except Belize, plus Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti in the Caribbean, and the ten Latin countries of South America including Brazil.
Why are Belize, Guyana, and Suriname excluded?: Latin America is defined by Romance-language heritage. Belize and Guyana are primarily English-speaking and Suriname is Dutch-speaking, so they appear on the map as context but are not quiz targets.
Is Latin America the same as South America?: No — Latin America also includes Mexico, most of Central America, and three Caribbean nations, while excluding the non-Latin countries of South America. Our South America quiz covers that continent's full 12 countries.
How many countries are in the Latin America map quiz?: Twenty. Mexico; six of Central America's seven countries, namely Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama; three Caribbean nations, Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic; and ten of South America's twelve, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay, Chile, Argentina and Uruguay. That is the standard list of Latin American sovereign states.
Why are Belize, Guyana and Suriname not included?: Latin America is defined by Romance-language heritage. Belize and Guyana are English-speaking, legacies of British Honduras and British Guiana, and Suriname is Dutch-speaking, so none of the three qualifies. All three are drawn on the quiz map as context but are never named as targets. The same reasoning excludes Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago and the rest of the Anglophone Caribbean.
Is Mexico part of Latin America or part of North America?: Both, because the two labels answer different questions. Mexico sits on the North American continent, and it is Latin American because Spanish is its national language. Continental membership is about landmass; Latin America is about colonial language heritage. Central America is usually counted as part of North America as well, but Mexico is the only target here drawn from north of it, and the northernmost of the twenty.
Which countries do players miss most often in this quiz?: The Central American chain and Hispaniola cause the most trouble. Honduras and Nicaragua are easy to swap, Guatemala and Honduras blur together, and El Salvador and Costa Rica are hard to place by shape alone. On the islands, Haiti and the Dominican Republic get reversed: Haiti holds the western third of Hispaniola, the Dominican Republic the eastern two-thirds. In South America, Paraguay and Uruguay are confused by name rather than position.
Is the quiz free, and is my score saved?: The quiz is free, runs in your browser, and needs no signup or account. Your best score is stored locally on the device you play on, so you can return and try to beat it. Nothing is uploaded and there is no shared leaderboard. Clearing your browser's site data, using private browsing, or switching to a different device or browser will reset the saved best.

More map quizzes

This is one of 41 free map quizzes on Trivio — countries, capitals, flags and US states, all on real interactive maps.