Embassies and consulates — how this layer is made

What you are looking at

Each point is a diplomatic mission — a feature tagged `office=diplomatic` in OpenStreetMap. 17,206 of them worldwide, drawn as a dot coloured by the kind of mission and sized by the footprint of the premises.

Click any feature to see what OpenStreetMap records about it — which state or organisation runs it, and its website, which is usually where opening hours and appointments live. Where it has a Wikipedia article, a short summary is fetched live and shown in your own language; and every feature links to the OpenStreetMap object it came from.

The kinds of mission

Embassy — 10,467 features, 60.8%. The mission to a state, normally in its capital.
Consulate — 5,309 features, 30.9%. A mission in another city, mostly handling visas and its own citizens.
Ambassador's residence — 711 features, 4.1%. The ambassador's house rather than the mission itself.
Liaison office — 346 features, 2.0%.
Other — 18 features. Permanent missions to international organisations, trade missions, and a few plainly mistagged.
Unknown — 355 features, 2.1%. An office recorded as diplomatic with nothing saying what kind.

Embassy and consulate are given full-strength, maximally separated colours rather than two shades of one. Nearly a third of the layer is consulates, so neither is the background the other stands out against — and a reader looking for the office that issues visas is on a different errand from one looking for the embassy.

The ambassador's house is not the embassy

711 of these are residences, and until 31 July 2026 this map drew them as embassies. An ambassador's residence is a house. It issues no visas, transacts no business and is not somewhere you can call on — so showing it in the same colour as the mission was telling you something untrue about 711 addresses.

They are hard to spot in the data, which is why they were missed: 697 of the 711 also carry `diplomatic=embassy`, and the only tag distinguishing them is `embassy=residence` — a key OpenStreetMap deprecated years ago but which mappers still use heavily. The remaining fourteen use the newer `diplomatic=ambassadors_residence` or `diplomatic=residence`.

They are shown rather than removed. A residence is a real diplomatic address that somebody deliberately mapped, and the useful thing is to see it and to see that it is not the mission.

High commissions are here, and they are drawn as embassies

A high commission is what Commonwealth countries call their embassies to one another — the British High Commission in Delhi, the Indian High Commission in London. 418 features are tagged as such, on the same deprecated `embassy` key.

They are not given a colour of their own, because a high commission is not a different kind of thing from an embassy: it is an embassy under a different name. So they sit in the embassy class, and a reader who goes looking for one will find it there.

(An earlier version of this page said there were no high commissions on the map at all. That was wrong. The newer `diplomatic` key has no value for them, which is where the mistake came from, but the older key names them outright.)

Why this layer should not be read per head of population

Almost every other layer on HueMaps rewards a per-capita reading — libraries per million people says something about a country. This one does not, and the ratio would mislead.

Missions cluster in capitals rather than following population. A country with one dominant capital scores high whatever its size; a large federal country with its diplomatic quarter in one city and consulates spread across a dozen others scores differently again for reasons that have nothing to do with how much diplomacy it does. India has 529 missions and Germany 925 — a comparison that says more about which cities host consulates than about either country.

What the map does show honestly is where the missions are:

France — 1,220 missions
United States — 1,020
Italy — 999
China — 991
Germany — 925
Russia — 886
Turkey — 647
Netherlands — 634

Counted crudely, by a bounding box around each country. Boxes overlap at borders and clip islands, so read these as approximate.

The picture is a cluster on each capital

The densest single view anywhere is Brussels, with around 370 missions on one z9 tile — bilateral embassies plus the missions to the European Union and to NATO, three sets of diplomacy in one city. Then Washington (about 270), London (260), Rome (250), Paris (240) and New York (230), where the last is the permanent missions to the United Nations rather than embassies at all.

That shape — a knot on a handful of cities and empty space in between — is the real geography of diplomacy rather than a gap in the mapping. It is also why this layer is drawn to a deeper zoom than most: see below.

Two features in three are a point, not a shape

64.6% of this layer has no footprint at all. Only 6,082 of the 17,206 features are traced as an outline.

The reason is what these places are. An embassy in a capital's diplomatic quarter is often a compound somebody has drawn round; a consulate or a permanent mission is frequently one floor of an office block, and a mapper marks a point rather than tracing a building that is not the mission's own.

So the size of a dot is mostly not telling you how large the mission is. Most dots are drawn at one nominal size, set at the median of the ones that do have a shape. Where a feature genuinely is traced, its size is real.

Drawn to a deeper zoom than most layers

Most layers here stop at zoom 16. This one goes to 18, and the reason is the point above. The densest zoom-16 tile on earth holds 63 missions — Manhattan around the United Nations, where the permanent missions are stacked into a few office blocks — and at that crowding a single tile cannot separate them all. Two further zoom levels give them room. Nothing is missing at 16; every mission still appears, at the zoom where there is space for it.

Mapped, not modelled

Each feature is an object a mapper drew, from survey, local knowledge or a plaque they walked past; nothing here is modelled or estimated, and no diplomatic list has been merged in. There is no official worldwide register of missions in this map — a foreign ministry publishes its own missions abroad, and nobody publishes everybody's.

That matters for what an empty space means. A country whose missions nobody has mapped looks the same as a country with no missions.

What is in and what is out

Offices tagged `diplomatic=non_diplomatic` are excluded. That value says the office is not a mission, which is not a kind of mission.

The largest features are embassy compounds, and they are genuinely that large. The United States' embassy in Baghdad is 388,756 m² and France's in Addis Ababa 385,157 m² — small fortified estates rather than buildings. They are three orders of magnitude above the median of 638 m², and the size scale is deliberately capped below them so that ordinary missions remain distinguishable from one another.

Honorary consulates are here where 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 tag does not reliably separate the two.

Size

Each symbol is sized by the footprint of the feature, in square metres measured on the globe. Symbol area is proportional to that (radius to its square root).

Among the third of features that are traced, the median footprint is 638 m², the 90th percentile 9,688 m² and the 99th 51,321 m². The scale is set differently at far and close zoom so that both a consular office and an embassy compound remain readable.

98.4% carry a name — the highest share of any layer on HueMaps. A mission exists to be found.

A picture of the present

Today's map, not a history. OpenStreetMap is edited continuously; this copy is refreshed periodically. Missions open, close and move with the state of relations between countries, so a mission shown here may have been withdrawn.

Source and licence

Back to the map