The Río Verde
From the valleys of Oaxaca to the Pacific
▶ Play it onlineThe Río Verde starts as the Atoyac, a small river in the hills north of Oaxaca city. It runs south through the central valleys, where the city and the old towns of Zaachila and Ocotlán sit, picks up the Salado from the Tlacolula valley, and then drops through the Sierra Madre del Sur, where the Sordo joins from the Mixteca, before it reaches the Pacific near Jamiltepec. The carved channel follows it the whole way. The piece around Oaxaca city is the last plate of the descent.
What a child works out
- A river can change its name along the way.
- Valleys high in the mountains are where towns grew first.
- The same river links the city to a coast it never sees.
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 250 × 176 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 The Río Verde.
The plate
- Pieces
- 14 pieces
- Plate
- 250 × 176 mm
- Scale
- 1 mm ≈ 1.2 km
- Vertical exaggeration
- × 1
- Thickness
- 8.8 mm
- Smallest piece
- 130 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
- Atoyac 4
- Coatlán
- Jamiltepec
- Juquila
- Miahuatlán
- Oaxaca
- Ocotlán
- Salado
- San José del Progreso
- Sola de Vega
- Sordo
- Teojomulco
- Zaachila
- Zaniza
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
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- Pieces
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- Scale
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- Price
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- Scale
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- Pieces
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- Scale
- 1 mm ≈ 4.7 km
- Suitable for
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- Price
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