Every cathedral in the world

A map of every building OpenStreetMap knows as a cathedral — thousands of them, on every inhabited continent. A cathedral is the church that holds a bishop’s cathedra, his throne; it’s a rank, not a size or a style, which is why the set runs from the great Gothic piles of Europe to tin-roofed seats of new dioceses across Africa, Asia and the Pacific. The dots are coloured by denomination, so the map doubles as a picture of how the Christian churches divide up the globe.

The points load live from OpenStreetMap, so it’s the full set OSM has, not a hand-picked list. Use the toggles to show or hide a denomination; tap a dot for the name, the denomination, and links to its Wikipedia article and to open it in your phone’s maps app or Google Maps. Tap the ◎ button on the map to drop a pin on your current location and find the cathedrals near you.

Loading cathedrals from OpenStreetMap…

The denominations

Every dot is grouped into one of seven families by its OpenStreetMap denomination tag. The big two are Rome and the Orthodox East; the rest trace the later splits of the Reformation and the ancient churches that never sat under either.

• Roman Catholic — by far the largest group: the Latin Church in communion with the Pope, the dioceses that gave Europe and Latin America most of their great cathedrals.
• Eastern Orthodox — the Greek, Russian, Serbian, Romanian and other autocephalous churches; dense across Eastern Europe, Russia, the Balkans and the Caucasus.
• Anglican — the Church of England and the wider Anglican Communion (Episcopal in the US and Scotland), centred on Britain, its former colonies and the Commonwealth.
• Protestant — the Reformation churches gathered together: Lutheran, Reformed and Presbyterian, plus Methodist, Baptist and the rest.
• Eastern Catholic — Byzantine- and other Eastern-rite churches in communion with Rome, such as the Ukrainian and Melkite Greek Catholics and the Maronites.
• Oriental Orthodox — the ancient non-Chalcedonian churches: Armenian Apostolic, Coptic, Ethiopian and Syriac.
• Other / unspecified — everything else, and the large number of records OSM carries with no denomination tag at all (including many famous cathedrals where it simply hasn’t been added).

How it’s built

One self-contained page, all free and open tools, no API key anywhere. Leaflet draws the map; OpenStreetMap serves the tiles; and the cathedral locations are fetched at load time from the Overpass API, which queries live OpenStreetMap data — here, every object worldwide tagged building=cathedral. The denomination in each popup comes from that same OpenStreetMap record.

So the map appears instantly, it first draws a saved snapshot that ships with the page (and, on repeat visits, your browser’s cached copy of the last live result), then quietly refreshes from the live Overpass API in the background and swaps in anything that’s changed. The worldwide query is a big one, so that refresh can take a little while; if the live service is busy or unreachable, you still get the full snapshot rather than a blank map.

A caveat on the data

The locations come from OpenStreetMap, which is community-maintained: a cathedral that was recently consecrated, deconsecrated or renamed may be missing or stale, a few points can be slightly off, and the denomination tag is uneven — some churches called “cathedral” in their own tradition are tagged differently or not at all, and former cathedrals now used otherwise may linger. “Cathedral” here means whatever OSM has tagged building=cathedral, which won’t line up exactly with any one church’s official list. Treat this as a starting point, not the last word.