Zoos and theme parks — how this layer is made

What you are looking at

Each point is a ticketed day out — a feature tagged `tourism=zoo`, `tourism=theme_park` or `tourism=aquarium` in OpenStreetMap. 21,309 of them worldwide, drawn as a dot coloured by which of the three it is and sized by the area of the site.

Click any attraction to see what OpenStreetMap records about it — who runs it, its own website, where a mapper noted that. Where it has a Wikipedia article, a short summary is fetched live and shown in your own language; and every attraction links to the OpenStreetMap object it came from.

Three kinds, one layer

Theme park — 10,790 features, 51%. Anything from a national resort to a small local funfair site.
Zoo — 8,883 features, 42%.
Aquarium — 1,636 features, 8%.

They are one layer because they are one kind of place — somewhere you buy a ticket and spend a day — and three colours because somebody looking for a zoo is not looking for a rollercoaster.

"Zoo" here is broader than the English word

`tourism=zoo` in OpenStreetMap also covers safari parks, wildlife centres, bird parks, reptile houses and petting farms. There is a `zoo=*` subtag that would separate them, but it is present on under 15% of features and its values are used inconsistently, so it is not usable for a legend.

If you find a small farm park drawn in the same green as a national zoological garden, that is the tagging rather than an error on this map. The size of the dot is the honest signal of which you are looking at.

Size actually means something here

Each symbol is sized by the area of the site, in square metres measured on the globe. Symbol area is proportional to that (radius to its square root), so a park four times the area draws twice as wide.

This is the layer where that scale earns its place. The median footprint is 16,273 m², the 90th percentile is 252,209 m², and the largest single feature is Walt Disney World at 74.2 square kilometres. Three orders of magnitude separate a city aquarium in one building from a safari park you drive through — and unlike on most layers, that difference is real rather than an artefact of how carefully somebody traced the outline.

69.5% of this layer is mapped as an outline rather than a bare point, the best share of the six layers added alongside it: a day out is usually worth the mapper's effort to draw properly. The remaining 30% are a single point and are drawn at a nominal small size rather than at the minimum.

85% carry a name.

Mapped, not modelled

Each attraction is an object a mapper drew, from survey, local knowledge or aerial imagery; nothing here is modelled or estimated, and no tourism register has been merged in.

Where they are — and this one is close to a real map of the world

Counted crudely — features inside a bounding box, per million people — Germany has about 28, France 23, Russia 17, the United Kingdom 8, the United States 6, China 2.3 and India 0.47. That is a Germany-to-India ratio of around 60 to 1, which by the standards of this site is low: the ambulance stations layer is over 800, the windmills layer around 330.

In absolute numbers China holds more of these than any other country (3,296).

The reason is simple: every country has attractions people pay to visit, so the underlying thing being counted really does exist everywhere. What remains of the unevenness is the ordinary OpenStreetMap caveat about who has mapped what, without a second layer of "and the thing itself is European" on top of it. Of the layers built from OpenStreetMap on this site, this is one of the two — with observatories — that comes closest to being a map of the world rather than a map of its mappers.

What is not here

A zoo inside a larger park mapped only as the larger park. A seasonal funfair that sets up in a car park, which is an event rather than a place. An aquarium that is one room of a science museum, which is usually tagged as the museum. And any attraction whose site is mapped but which nobody has tagged with these words.

A picture of the present

Today's map, not a history. OpenStreetMap is edited continuously; this copy is refreshed periodically. There is no year control, and an attraction closed some time ago may still be mapped until a mapper updates it.