Markets — how this layer is made

What you are looking at

Each dot is a marketplace. There are more than 95,000 worldwide. Colour represents whether the market is inside a building, and the size of a dot represents its footprint. Click on any of them to see what OpenStreetMap records, such as who 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 market here is something a mapper added at the OpenStreetMap website, from a survey, from local knowledge or from a market they walked through. We don't model or estimate anything ourselves, and we haven't merged in any national register of markets.

What we include

We use one exact tag, `amenity=marketplace`. Because we match the tag exactly, a feature tagged as a marketplace and something else together is missed, though that way of tagging is uncommon.

Colour

There are two colours. We draw a market as a covered market where the feature also carries a `building` tag, which is about one market in five, and everything else is grey. That grey says something about the record rather than about the market. Of the markets somebody has traced as an outline, roughly a third carry a building tag, and of those mapped as a single point almost none do, because a point has no shape and so cannot be a building. Most of the grey is markets nobody has traced yet rather than markets held in the open air. You can untick the grey row in the legend to leave the covered halls on their own.

The legend you would rather have is what a market sells, and OpenStreetMap does not record it. The tags that would say run to a few dozen features each across the whole world, and on the one tag with wider use the commonest value is furniture. We don't draw a legend finer than the data supports.

A market is a place, not an event

A marketplace is the place a market is held. It may be a covered hall, a square that fills with stalls twice a week, a permanent street of traders or a wholesale complex on the edge of a city, and all of those are here. No tag with usable coverage separates a permanent hall from a square used one morning a week, so you cannot tell from the map which one a dot is.

Size

The size of a dot represents the footprint of the market in square metres, measured on the globe. Two markets in five have no shape at all and are mapped as a single point, and we draw those at one nominal size, so across much of this map the size is not telling you how large the market is. Among the markets that are traced, a typical one covers about 2,500 m², and there the size does real work, because the difference between a market hall and a market square is largely a difference of area. The largest is the wholesale market at Rungis outside Paris, which covers more than two square kilometres. We cap the size scale well below it so ordinary markets stay distinguishable from one another.

Where the map is empty

An empty area means nobody has mapped a market there, not that nobody trades there. Mapping is thinner where fewer people edit OpenStreetMap. Countries also organise trading differently, so a place with a small daily market in every neighbourhood genuinely has more separate marketplaces than one working from a few large halls.

Up to date, mostly

OpenStreetMap is edited continuously, and we take a new copy once every one to three months. A market shown here may have stopped trading, and a market square usually keeps its name and its shape long after it does.

Source and licence

Back to the map