

The Suárez
From the Ubaté valley down to the Chicamocha
▶ Play it onlineThe Suárez starts in the highland valleys north of Bogotá and runs north through Boyacá and Santander, collecting the Fonce from San Gil before it reaches the Chicamocha. For most of that way it sits at the bottom of a steep valley, and the towns sit above it on the benches and plateaus. One small piece on its east bank is the valley of the creek that runs past Barichara, and that piece is the last plate of the descent.
What a child works out
- Towns in steep country are built above the river, not beside it.
- A tributary like the Fonce can be almost as big as the river it joins.
- Every piece on this plate is a smaller watershed you could cut again.
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 The Suárez.
The plate
- Pieces
- 18 pieces
- Plate
- 176 × 250 mm
- Scale
- 1 mm ≈ 791 m
- Vertical exaggeration
- × 1
- Thickness
- 8.8 mm
- Smallest piece
- 105 mm²
- Fit
- 0.35 mm clearance
- Material
- PLA, printed in Switzerland
5 named; the rest are sub-basins the source data leaves unnamed.
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
- Barichara
- Fonce
- Moniquirá
- Oibita
- Suta
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 — The world to the creek below Barichara, cut by ridge lines
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A continent divided only by where water goes
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- Pieces
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- Scale
- 1 mm ≈ 49.4 km
- Suitable for
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- Price
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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.
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- 13 pieces
- Scale
- 1 mm ≈ 14.5 km
- Suitable for
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- Price
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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
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- Scale
- 1 mm ≈ 4.7 km
- Suitable for
- Ages 8 and up
- Price
- CHF 15.00







