About

Learn the world, and keep it.

Cartola is a free geography learning app. It teaches every country of the world, 197 in all, and makes sure you still know them next month and next year.

How it works

  1. Find out what you know. A short assessment per continent gives you a score for each topic. Everything you miss becomes your learning plan.
  2. Learn in small batches. New countries arrive a few at a time, region by region. You see each one first, then recall it until it sticks.
  3. Play, don't drill. The same facts come back through different games: pinpointing on a map, guessing an outline, hot-and-cold on a globe, routing through neighbours and naming them all against the clock.
  4. Refresh just in time. Spaced repetition (the FSRS algorithm) brings each fact back just before you would forget it. A few minutes a day keeps the whole world in your head.

What you can learn

  • On the map — Find every country on a blank map.
  • Country shapes — Recognise a country from its outline.
  • Flags — Name the country behind every flag.
  • Capitals — Know the capital of every country.
  • Population — Get a feel for how many people live where.
  • Neighbours — Know who borders whom, over land.

Browse the atlas of all 197 countries or start with a continent: Europe, Asia, Americas, Africa, Oceania.

Frequently asked questions

What is Cartola?
Cartola is a free geography learning app on the web. It teaches all 197 countries of the world (the 193 UN member states plus Vatican City, Palestine, Kosovo and Taiwan): where they are, their shapes, flags, capitals, populations and land neighbours.
How is Cartola different from a geography quiz?
A quiz tells you what you know today. Cartola also remembers what you learned and schedules each fact to come back just before you would forget it (spaced repetition, using the FSRS algorithm), so you keep what you learn for months and years.
Is Cartola free?
Yes. Cartola is free to use, without ads. You can use it without an account; signing in only adds syncing your progress between devices.
Who is Cartola for?
Anyone who wants to know the world map: students, teachers, travellers, GeoGuessr players and the curious. It works on phones, tablets and computers in any modern browser.
Where does the data come from?
Map shapes come from Natural Earth, populations from the World Bank, country facts from the open world-countries dataset, and flags from Wikimedia Commons in their official proportions. See the data sources below.

Data sources

  • Maps and country shapes: Natural Earth, via world-atlas (public domain).
  • Population: World Bank, World Development Indicators (CC BY 4.0).
  • Country facts (names, capitals, borders, area): world-countries by Mohammed Le Doze (ODbL 1.0), with corrections kept under version control.
  • Flags: Wikimedia Commons, in official proportions — public domain, except the flag of Oman (Government of Oman, Open Government Licence – Oman 1.0).

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