Places of worship — how this layer is made

What you are looking at

Each dot is a place of worship, whether a church, mosque, temple, synagogue, gurdwara or shrine. There are more than 1.5 million of them worldwide. Colour represents the religion, and the size of a dot represents the footprint of the building. Click on any of them to see what OpenStreetMap records, such as the religion and the denomination. 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 place here is something a mapper added 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 national register of religious buildings.

What we include

We use one exact tag, `amenity=place_of_worship`. A church hall, a religious school or a cemetery is left off unless that feature is also tagged as a place of worship. Several of the larger religions have a map of their own as well, which shows everything of that religion rather than its places of worship alone. Where a place records its religion under a word that means one religion and nothing else, such as `catholic` or `islamic`, we count it as that religion and keep the exact wording for the panel. Values that state nothing, such as `yes` or an asterisk, we treat as no religion recorded.

Colour

Colour represents the religion. The eight religions with the most mapped places each take a colour of their own, and so do Jainism and the places tagged as serving several faiths at once. Everything else shares a single colour, because roughly 800 different values appear in the data and no legend can hold 800 colours. Where a religion has a traditional colour we follow it, such as green for Islam and blue for Judaism. Saffron belongs to four of these religions at once, so those four take shades of one warm family, and every colour has to stay apart from the rest for readers who find some pairs hard to separate.

Religion not recorded

Not every place of worship says which religion it is. Fewer than one in ten of these places record no religion, and we keep those and draw them in a neutral grey rather than dropping them. A place of worship with no religion recorded is still a place of worship. A few dozen places state more than one religion, and because a dot can only be one colour, each takes the first of its religions in the order of the legend, with its full set in the panel.

Size

The size of a dot represents the footprint of the place in square metres. About two in five places are mapped as a single point with no outline, and we draw those at one nominal size, so for much of this map the size is not telling you how large the place is. A large temple complex covers more ground than a village chapel, and the map says nothing about which matters more to the people who use it.

Where the map is empty

An empty area means nobody has mapped a place of worship there, not that nobody worships there. Coverage is strongest in western and central Europe and in other well mapped regions, and thinner across much of Africa and southern Asia. A dense patch tells you the area is well mapped before it tells you anything about religion.

Up to date, mostly

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

Source and licence

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