How this site works

You want to know two things: where can I stop tonight, and will someone knock on the window at 2am. This page explains how we answer that and how much to trust the answer.

What gets a pin, and what does not

A place appears on the map only if a named body has designated it as somewhere you may stop. A commune that created an aire, a town that signed a Stellplatz, a comune that authorised a sosta, a US agency that publishes a dispersed camping area. Free is the bar for inclusion. Where a place is free to park but charges for water or electricity, we say that rather than quietly dropping it.

Wild camping never gets a pin. It gets a rules page instead: what the law or access code actually permits, where it applies, and what conditions attach. There is a practical reason on top of the legal one. Coordinates for informal spots are how those spots fill up, then get complaints, then get a barrier.

Where the information comes from

We do not have inside information. Every place record names one source and keeps it:

• OpenStreetMap, under the ODbL, for the stopovers its contributors have mapped across Europe. Credited site-wide as that licence requires.
• National and regional open data, such as France's DATAtourisme under the Etalab 2.0 licence, which carries a per-record producer credit. That credit is rendered on the place page, not just stored.
• US federal sources, the Recreation Information Database and the Bureau of Land Management, for free camping on public land.
• The official page itself, where a commune, Gemeinde or municipality publishes the stopover directly.

We never merge those layers together into one deduplicated blob. Each record stays attached to the source it came from, which is both what the licences require and what lets you check any single fact against one specific place.

For rules content it is the body that makes the rule: a national access code, a forest or park authority, a regional decree, a commune byelaw. We read the source in its own language, write down what it says in plain English, link to it, and date it. Where our summary and the original disagree, the original wins.

What the last-verified date means

It means a person opened that source on that date and confirmed it still said what we claim it says. That is all it means. It is not a promise the rule is still true today: an authority can change a policy the day after we check.

Treat an old date as a reason to click the source yourself. Treat a recent date as a reason to be a little more confident, and then click the source yourself anyway if you are driving a long way for it.

Why some fields are blank

Because we have not verified them. A blank means we do not know, not that anything goes.

This matters most on amenities. If a record does not say whether there is drinking water, that means nobody has recorded it, not that the tap is absent. The two look identical if you flatten them, so we do not flatten them: an unknown renders as unknown and a confirmed no renders as no.

We could fill every gap by inferring from the next town over or from what a rule probably says. We do not, because a plausible guess is worse than an honest gap. A guess reads exactly like a fact, and you cannot tell which one got you the fine. Null beats wrong.

How to actually use it

1. Start with the country. The system is national before it is local. Knowing what an aire is, and that it is not the same thing as a Stellplatz, saves you more time than any single listing.
2. Narrow to the region, then the place. Read the amenities and the access notes. Height barriers and seasonal gates are the two things that turn a good plan into a three-point turn in the dark.
3. Read the rule and the date. If the date is old or the stakes are high, open the source link.
4. Ring the mairie, Gemeinde, comune or district office if it is close. The number is on the source page. They know about the closure that has not made it online yet.
5. Believe the sign. When you arrive, the posted sign is the authority. If it contradicts us, it wins. Then email us so we can fix the page.

Who writes it

A small editorial team, not a masthead of invented experts. Nothing on this site is a field report unless someone actually went, and we do not publish first-person accounts of trips nobody took. What we can promise is that every claim traces to a source you can open.

What we get wrong

Rules go stale. Communes withdraw aires quietly. Amenity data ages badly, because a tap that worked in 2023 is not a tap that works now. We miss things. If you find one, send the page and the source that proves it: info@freecampmaps.com. That is the fastest way this site gets better.