Colour–magnitude diagram for the spatially-limited sample of members of ρ Ophiuchi with a known spectral type. The 1 Myr isochrone shifted at a distance of 130 pc from the BT-Settl evolutionary model (Allard et al. 2010) is shown for A_V = 0, 8, 15, and 20 mag (solid black line), while the 1 Myr isochrones for the NextGen (Baraffe et al. 1998), Dusty (Chabrier et al. 2000), and Siess et al. (2000) are also shown for comparison (solid grey line). The diagram shows the stellar members (black filled circles), members at the substellar limit and brown dwarfs (grey filled circles), members with uncertain spectral types (open circles), contaminants found in our spectroscopic follow-up (asterisks), and candidate brown dwarfs from the WIRCam survey which have not been observed spectroscopically (crosses). The dashed line shows the photometric completeness limits of the WIRCam survey at J = 20.5 and H = 18.9.