Christian sites — how this layer is made

What you are looking at

Churches, chapels and cathedrals make up most of this map, but it holds a good deal more than places of worship. Churchyards, wayside crosses, monasteries, church schools and deconsecrated churches are all here. There are more than 1.6 million sites worldwide. Colour represents what kind of site it is, and the size of a dot represents the footprint of the building. Click on any of them for what OpenStreetMap records, including the denomination. If there's a Wikipedia article, we show a short summary and a link, in your own language where possible.

Where the data comes from

Mappers added every one of these at the OpenStreetMap website, from a survey, from local knowledge or from a building they walked past. We don't model or estimate anything ourselves, and we have merged in no denomination's own list of churches.

What we include

A site is here when OpenStreetMap's `religion` tag says Christian, or when the feature is a church, chapel or cathedral building, or a wayside cross. We read the religion tag generously, so more than twenty spellings that name a denomination instead of the religion, `catholic` and `evangélica` among them, all count. Taking the tag at its word means we inherit its errors. Several hundred buildings recorded as churches state a different religion, some genuine conversions and some mistakes, and nothing in the data separates the two.

Colour

Colour represents what kind of site it is rather than which religion, because the religion is the whole map. Places of worship are about three-fifths of it and wayside crosses and shrines about a fifth. Church and chapel buildings that no other rule named come next, then churchyards and cemeteries, and grounds, schools, offices and monasteries each appear as well. We draw deconsecrated churches, ruins and closed chapels in grey rather than as one more kind of working site.

Wayside crosses

About a fifth of this map is wayside crosses and shrines, standing overwhelmingly in the Alpine countries, Poland, Germany and the Czech Republic. They are genuinely there, but how thickly they appear says as much about the habits of mapping in that part of Europe as about anything else. We also count crosses that record no religion at all, on the evidence that almost every tagged one says Christian, and that roughly doubled the class. You can hide the whole class from the legend.

Size

The size of a dot represents the footprint of the site in square metres. About two in five sites are mapped as a single point with no outline, many of them wayside crosses, which have nothing to trace, and we draw those at one nominal size. We draw churches as though their footprint were twice its real size, which makes them about half as wide again, because a church is a building while a churchyard is a field and a church school has playing fields. That weighting leaves the real order of sizes intact. The largest site is an Orthodox monastic territory in Ethiopia covering hundreds of square kilometres, and we cap the size scale far below it.

Where the map is empty

An absent church means nobody has mapped it, not that nobody worships in the area. Mapping is more complete in western and central Europe, North America and Australia than across much of Africa and southern Asia, and in several countries with very many churches only a fraction have been drawn. In the United States a large part of this layer came from a bulk copy of a government database rather than from anyone surveying.

Up to date, mostly

OpenStreetMap is edited continuously, and we take a new copy once every one to three months. A church shown here may have closed or been converted, and the building usually stands for years afterwards.

Source and licence

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