Southern Mexico
From Acapulco to the Guatemalan border
▶ Play it onlineSouthern Mexico's Pacific coast is where the Sierra Madre del Sur meets the sea, and almost nothing has room to become a big river. Most of this plate is short coastal streams, cut here into stretches named for the places along them: Acapulco, the Costa Chica, Puerto Escondido, Huatulco. The exception is the Río Verde, which reaches far back into the mountains to the valleys around Oaxaca city. It is its own piece, and the next plate of the descent.
What a child works out
- Mountains close to the sea make short rivers.
- Only a river that reaches behind the mountains can grow large.
- A coast can be divided into pieces just like a basin.
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 Southern Mexico.
The plate
- Pieces
- 14 pieces
- Plate
- 250 × 176 mm
- Scale
- 1 mm ≈ 5.1 km
- Vertical exaggeration
- × 3.81
- Thickness
- 8.8 mm
- Smallest piece
- 105 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
- Acapulco
- Costa Chica
- Costa Grande
- Huatulco
- Huixtla
- Juchitán
- Ometepec
- Papagayo
- Puerto Escondido
- Tapachula
- Tapachula 2
- Tehuantepec
- Tonalá
- Verde
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