Veredas de Colombia

What is this?

This is a searchable map of every vereda in Colombia — 32,050 of them, across 1,121 municipalities and all 33 departments, San Andrés y Providencia included. It exists because veredas are almost impossible to look up anywhere else: Google Maps and most other mainstream mapping services carry data down to the municipality and then stop, so searching for a vereda by name usually returns nothing at all. Type a name here and you get the matching veredas, their municipality and department, and their boundary drawn on the map. It is meant as a quick reference tool, nothing more.

What is a vereda?

A vereda is the smallest administrative unit in Colombia — a rural subdivision of a municipality. Colombia is divided into departments (departamentos), departments into municipalities (municipios), and the rural parts of each municipality into veredas. A vereda is roughly the catchment of a scattered rural settlement: a few dozen to a few hundred households spread over farmland, usually with a school and a name everybody locally knows. Rural addresses, land records, election rolls and news reports all refer to veredas constantly, which is exactly why not being able to find one on a map is so frustrating.

Where does the data come from?

The boundaries are DANE's Capa de Referencia de Veredas 2024 (CRVeredas), obtained from the OCHA Humanitarian Data Exchange — dataset cod-ab-col, resource shp_crveredas_2024.zip — and downloaded on 2 August 2026. Each feature carries a vereda name (NOMBRE_VER), municipality (NOMB_MPIO), department (NOM_DEP), a unique code (CODIGO_VER) and an area in hectares (AREA_HA).

It is worth being precise about what "2024" means here. It is the year DANE published the reference layer, not the year the boundaries were surveyed. The layer is a compilation: DANE assembled it from whatever each municipality had available — municipal land-use plans (POT and EOT), IGAC cadastral cartography, earlier Esri layers, UNODC mapping and others — and each vereda carries a VIGENCIA field recording the year its geometry dates from. Those years span 1990 to 2017, and for roughly 29% of veredas the vintage is undetermined altogether.

There is still no official, uniformly surveyed national vereda layer for Colombia. DANE's reference layer is the closest thing that exists, which is why it is what this map uses.

How it works

The whole site is static — there is no backend, no database and no API behind it. Every vereda polygon is packed into a single PMTiles vector-tile archive stored as one object on Cloudflare R2. Your browser reads slices out of that archive with HTTP range requests, so it downloads only the few kilobytes of tiles covering what is currently on screen, never the whole dataset. MapLibre GL JS renders those tiles in the browser. Search runs against a small pre-built index of names and coordinates that loads once and then works entirely offline in the page — no query ever leaves your browser.

Accuracy & limitations

Precision varies enormously from one municipality to the next, and that is inherent to the source rather than something this map introduced. Because the reference layer is stitched together from whatever each municipality had, a boundary may come from a recent cadastral survey in one place and from a hand-drawn planning map of the 1990s next door. Vereda geometries date from anywhere between 1990 and 2017, with about 29% carrying no recorded date at all, so newer veredas may be missing and some names will be out of date. Treat every boundary as an indication of roughly where a vereda is, not as a legal delimitation of where it ends.

Names, too, are recorded as the source has them: some are misspelled, and some differ from the form used locally. At low zoom levels the geometries are deliberately simplified so that the country fits in a handful of small tiles — boundaries only sharpen to full detail as you zoom in.

Nor are vereda names unique. The same name — El Placer, Buenavista, La Esperanza and dozens of others — recurs in municipality after municipality, so a search usually returns several matches. Always check the municipality and department shown next to each result before assuming you have the right one.

Data & licences

The vereda boundary data is © DANE, compiled from multiple public sources (municipal POT and EOT plans, IGAC cadastral cartography, Esri, UNODC and others) and published as open data through the OCHA Humanitarian Data Exchange, subject to the terms of the original publishers. Base map © OpenStreetMap contributors; satellite imagery © Esri World Imagery and its data providers.