OpenHistoricalMap/Projects/Colombia

All things Colombian history, starting with the evolution of Colombian departments. The near-term goal is to map all departments back to 1905–1910, when there was a major reorganization.

Sources

• Natural Earth Data Admin 1 - States, Provinces provides boundaries for present-day Colombian departments (as well as for all other countries in the world). Public Domain.
• Anexo:Cronología de la organización territorial de Colombia timeline of Colombian territorial organization from 1500 to present day. Includes links to Spanish Wikipedia articles on earlier versions of departments. Spanish Wikipedia has much better coverage of these than English Wikipedia.
• Territorial Evolution of South American countries by Crazy-Boris is the closest thing to a changelog that I've found. Sources and licensing are unclear, but this generally matches up very well with information in Wikipedia.
• Milenioscuro maps on Wikipedia maps of Colombia in 1824, 1886, 1905, 1908, 1912, 1916, 1928, 1942, 1958, 1966, 1990, and present day. CC BY-SA 4.0. Does not cite sources. These don't include all diffs, but they're helpful for telling whether you might have missed something.

CharliePlett has mapped many of the territorial divisions before the 1886 Colombian Constitution as part of the Spanish Empire project.

Terminology

Before the 1991 constitution, there were three types of states within Colombia. The 1991 constitution converted all of these into full departments.

• Department / Departamento: Modern term for a state/province in Colombia. There are 33 of them: 32 departments and the Special District of Bogotá.
• Intendancy / Intendencia: An area with less autonomy than an full department, centrally controlled from Bogotá.
• Commissariat / Comisaría: An area even less developed than an Intendencia.

Import Data

Initial import was from Natural Earth Data, converted from Shapefile to OSM PBF using geojson_to_osm.py. These lines were de-duped with existing lines from the Spanish Empire.

Tracking spreadsheet for each modern-day department.

Contact

danvk