Embassies and consulates — how this layer is made

What you are looking at

Each dot is a diplomatic mission. There are more than 17,000 worldwide. Colour represents the kind of mission, and the size of a dot represents the footprint of the premises. Click on any of them to see what OpenStreetMap records, such as which state or organisation runs it and its website. If there's a Wikipedia article, we show a short summary and a link to the full article, in your own language where possible.

Where the data comes from

Every mission here is something a mapper added at the OpenStreetMap website, from a survey, from local knowledge or from a plaque they walked past. We don't model or estimate anything ourselves. There is no worldwide register to merge in either, because a foreign ministry publishes its own missions abroad and nobody publishes everybody's.

What we include

We take features tagged `office=diplomatic`. An office tagged `diplomatic=non_diplomatic` says it is not a mission, so we leave it out. Honorary consulates are here wherever a mapper tagged them as consulates, and they are a different thing from a career consulate, often a local business person acting part-time. The tags do not separate the two reliably.

Colour

Colour represents the kind of mission. Embassies are about three in five and consulates a little under a third. The rest are ambassadors' residences, liaison offices, permanent missions to international organisations, and a few hundred offices recorded as diplomatic with nothing saying what kind. Embassy and consulate get full-strength colours set as far apart as we can make them rather than two shades of one. Neither is a small class beside the other, and someone looking for the office that issues visas is on a different errand from someone looking for the embassy.

Residences and high commissions

More than 700 of these features are the ambassador's house rather than the mission itself. A residence issues no visas and transacts no business, so it gets a colour of its own. They are hard to pick out of the data, because nearly all of them also carry the embassy tag, and the only thing marking them out is a key OpenStreetMap deprecated years ago that mappers still use heavily. We show them rather than remove them, because a residence is a real diplomatic address somebody deliberately mapped.

A high commission is what Commonwealth countries call their embassies to one another, and several hundred are tagged as such. We draw them in the embassy colour, because a high commission is an embassy under another name.

Size

The size of a dot represents the footprint of the mission in square metres. Roughly two features in three have no outline at all, and we draw those at one nominal size, so for most of this map the size of a dot is not telling you how large the mission is. An embassy in a capital's diplomatic quarter is often a compound somebody has traced, while a consulate is frequently one floor of an office block that the mission does not own. Among the features that do have a shape, a typical one covers about 600 m². The largest are fortified compounds of more than a third of a square kilometre, and we cap the size scale far below them.

Where the map is empty

Missions gather in capitals and in the few cities that host international organisations, and the empty space between them is the real geography of diplomacy rather than a gap in the mapping. Brussels holds the densest cluster, with more than 300 missions in one view. A country whose missions nobody has mapped still looks the same here as a country hosting none.

Up to date, mostly

OpenStreetMap is edited continuously, and we take a new copy once every one to three months. Missions open, close and move with the state of relations between countries, so a mission shown here may have been withdrawn.

Source and licence

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