Zoos and theme parks — how this layer is made

What you are looking at

Each dot is somewhere you buy a ticket and spend the day. There are more than 21,000 worldwide. Colour represents which of three kinds of place it is, and the size of a dot represents the area of the site. 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 attraction 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 tourism register.

What we include

Three exact tags:

`tourism=theme_park` is about half the map. It runs from a national resort to a small local funfair site.
`tourism=zoo` is a bit over two in five.
`tourism=aquarium` is under a tenth.

They share a map because they are one kind of place, and they take three colours because somebody looking for a zoo is not looking for a rollercoaster.

Several things fall outside that. A zoo inside a larger park, where only the park is mapped, is not here. A funfair that sets up in a car park for a week is an event rather than a place, so it is not here either. An aquarium that is one room of a science museum is usually tagged as the museum.

Colour

Colour represents which of the three an attraction is, and nothing else. A large green dot and a small green dot are the same kind of place at different sizes.

"Zoo" here is broader than the English word

`tourism=zoo` also covers safari parks, wildlife centres, bird parks, reptile houses and petting farms. OpenStreetMap has a subtag that would separate them, but fewer than one feature in six records it, and mappers use its values inconsistently, so we cannot build a legend on it. A small farm park therefore takes the same green as a national zoological garden. Where you need to tell them apart, the size of the dot is the better guide.

Size

The size of a dot represents the area of the site in square metres, measured on the globe. A site four times the area draws twice as wide. More than two thirds of these attractions are drawn as an outline rather than as a single point, which is a high share, and we draw the rest at one nominal size. A typical mapped site covers about 16,000 m², and the largest is Walt Disney World in Florida at more than 70 square kilometres. We cap the size scale far below that so ordinary parks stay distinguishable from one another. The range from a city aquarium in one building to a safari park you drive through is a real difference in ground covered rather than a difference in how carefully somebody traced the outline.

Where the map is empty

An empty area means nobody has mapped an attraction there, not that a place has none. Mapping is thinner where fewer people edit OpenStreetMap, and this layer follows that pattern like any other. Every country has places people pay to visit, so a gap here is usually a gap in the mapping rather than in the world.

Up to date, mostly

OpenStreetMap is edited continuously, and we take a new copy once every one to three months. An attraction that closed some years ago may still be mapped, and a closed park often keeps its buildings and its paths for a long time.

Source and licence

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