OpenHistoricalMap

OpenHistoricalMap goes beyond the present, mapping places throughout the world… throughout the ages.
No community is too small, no story too obscure to add to this map.
Everyone has something to contribute, including you!

Go to the map • Learn more…

Contribute

To contribute to OpenHistoricalMap, go to the main map, zoom in to a place of interest, and click the "Edit" button. If you are familiar with editing OpenStreetMap, the OpenHistoricalMap editing experience is very similar. See the tagging guidelines for information on a few changes we've made to accommodate the time dimension.

We also maintain several software projects to facilitate map contributions and data reuse. Please report any issues and send us your ideas on GitHub.

Then and now

From OpenHistoricalMap's community projects:

Left: The Choongwan district of the City of Victoria in Colonial Hong Kong as of 1800. Right: The same location today.

On this day

Selected establishments and disestablishments on April 19:

Template:OpenHistoricalMap/On this day/04/19

Statistics

1.1M
dated elements
360k
buildings
217k
railroad miles
127
average age
1930
average year
1,380
contributors

Source: Overpass API, Overpass API, Planet
April 1, 2024

Historical statistics

News

April 13, 2024: QLever now updates daily with the latest OpenHistoricalMap planet data.
April 10, 2024: In iD, you can now switch the background layer to Esri World Imagery Wayback layers captured on a variety of dates within the last decade.
February 13, 2024: An experimental new Railway style is now available in the Layer sidebar.
January 17, 2024: The University of Freiburg has set up QLever for querying OpenHistoricalMap data in conjunction with other datasets using SPARQL.
October 26, 2023: We briefly hit 1 million elements with a start_date=* or end_date=* tag for the first time. The millionth dated element is Hoctor Close in Melbourne.