Oaxaca
The valley around the city, creek by creek
▶ Play it onlineOaxaca city sits in a high valley where three valleys meet, beside the Atoyac, the river that becomes the Río Verde. This plate is the land around it, from the hills of Etla in the north down to the city, cut into the catchments of the creeks that run into the river. Five levels above it this was a sliver of the Pacific slope of North America; here the city and the mountains around it are the whole plate.
What a child works out
- A city grows where valleys meet and water runs.
- Every creek around a town has its own small territory.
- The same place looks completely different at every scale.
A download, to print yourself
- A .3mf file with the colours already assigned
- One STL per piece, for any other slicer
- A print guide with the settings and the order to print in
- For your own use; the licence is in the download
What you need to print it
- A build plate that takes 176 × 250 mm: the Bambu Lab A1, P1S and X1C (256 mm) do, the A1 mini (180 mm) does not
- A multicolour setup such as an AMS, for the colours as designed
Printed it? Got an idea?
Send me photos of your print and I'll add them to this page — or tell me what you'd add, leave out or change on Oaxaca.
The plate
- Pieces
- 23 pieces
- Plate
- 176 × 250 mm
- Scale
- 1 mm ≈ 203 m
- Vertical exaggeration
- × 1
- Thickness
- 8.8 mm
- Smallest piece
- 296 mm²
- Fit
- 0.35 mm clearance
- Material
- PLA, printed in Switzerland
B5 — the size of a school exercise book.
How much ground one millimetre of plate covers.
Height is stretched by this factor so the relief is readable at desk size.
Nothing is cut smaller than a child can pick up.
Printed in place, so every piece seats first time without sanding.
Every named piece
- C03
- C05
- C10
- C12
- C14
- C20
- C21
- C22
- C23
- Guelache
- Magdalena Apasco
- Oaxaca
- Reyes Etla
- San Agustín Etla
- San Felipe del Agua
- San Miguel Etla
- San Pablo Etla
- Santa Cruz el Salto
- Santa Cruz Etla
- Suchilquitongo
- Telixtlahuaca
- Tlaltinango
- Villa de Etla
Zoom in, zoom out
A piece of each of these is the subject of the next one. Each plate is redrawn at its own scale, so it is a real map at every level rather than an enlargement of the one above.
Follow the water — World → North America by River → Pacific Slope → Southern Mexico → Río Verde → Oaxaca
More from Watersheds
See all →
North America by River
A continent divided only by where water goes
No countries, no states. Twenty-nine pieces, each one the whole territory that drains into a single river.
- Pieces
- 28 pieces
- Scale
- 1 mm ≈ 49.4 km
- Suitable for
- Ages 8 and up
- Price
- CHF 15.00
The Mississippi
The basin that drains a third of a continent
Fifteen pieces — Missouri, Ohio, Arkansas, Red, Illinois — that together are about three million square kilometres of drainage.
- Pieces
- 13 pieces
- Scale
- 1 mm ≈ 14.5 km
- Suitable for
- Ages 8 and up
- Price
- CHF 15.00
The Upper Mississippi
The river before the Missouri joins it
Twenty-one pieces — the Minnesota, the St Croix, the Wisconsin, the Des Moines, the Cedar — draining the northern half of the Mississippi.
- Pieces
- 16 pieces
- Scale
- 1 mm ≈ 4.7 km
- Suitable for
- Ages 8 and up
- Price
- CHF 15.00