Golf courses — how this layer is made

What you are looking at

Each dot is a golf course. There are more than 39,000 worldwide. Colour represents how big a course it is, where somebody has recorded that, and the size of a dot represents the area of the course. Click on any of them to see what OpenStreetMap records, such as its size and par, who may play and who runs it. 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 course here is something a mapper drew at the OpenStreetMap website, from a survey, from local knowledge or from aerial imagery. We don't model or estimate anything ourselves, and we haven't merged in any register of clubs.

What we include

We use one exact tag, `leisure=golf_course`, which covers the course as a whole. We apply no size threshold. Because we match the tag exactly, a course tagged as something else at the same time falls out, though that way of tagging is uncommon.

Colour

Colour represents how big a course it is, and nine courses in ten do not say. Those are grey, and grey is a named class here. It tells you that nobody recorded the size, not that the course is unusual. The courses that do record it fall into four groups: the eighteen-hole full course, the nine-hole club course often played twice round, the twenty-seven holes or more of a resort, and the short courses, which are pitch-and-putt, par-3 and courses of a few holes.

We read the size from `golf:course`, which states it outright, and where that is missing from `golf:par`, from which the size follows, because a full course is par 68 to 74, a nine is 32 to 37 and anything below that is a short course. We use the par only as a fallback, because a nine played twice round is scored to a full course's par, and reading both tags at once would put one course in two groups.

A better answer exists and we have not built it. OpenStreetMap maps individual holes as objects inside the course, so counting them would classify nearly every course. That means matching each hole to the course around it, which our pipeline cannot do yet.

Who may play

Where OpenStreetMap records whether a course is open to the public, we show it in the panel when you click. It is what the tag said when we took this copy. Access arrangements change, and a course marked private may still admit visitors on some terms, so ask the club before you travel.

Size

The size of a dot represents the area of the course in square metres, measured on the globe. A course four times the area draws twice as wide. Size does more work here than on most maps, because nearly every course is drawn as an outline rather than as a single point, and a full eighteen-hole course really does cover several times the ground of a nine. Where the size class is missing, the size of the dot still tells you roughly what kind of course you have found.

Where the map is empty

An empty area means nobody has mapped a course there. This layer suffers less than most, because a course is large, distinctive from above and rarely missed once anyone maps the area at all. Coverage is strongest in western Europe, North America, Japan and Australia, which for golf is also close to where the courses are.

Up to date, mostly

OpenStreetMap is edited continuously, and we take a new copy once every one to three months. A course that has closed and been built over stays on the map until a mapper removes it.

Source and licence

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