Launching today
Detourmap
Every place worth the detour, on one interactive map
146 followers
Every place worth the detour, on one interactive map
146 followers
A free interactive world map of 70,520 places worth going out of your way for — ancient ruins, beaches, caves, waterfalls, volcanoes, monuments, sacred sites, castles, museums, gardens, theme parks and ghost towns across 350 countries. Pick a country, flip on the filters, and explore.
Detourmap
love that this exists, the filtering sounds solid. one thing i'd actually want though is a "near me" mode that uses your location to surface places within a driving radius, kind of like setting a max distance so you can find hidden spots for a weekend trip without manually scanning the map
Detourmap
@nimet3paw A 'within X km of me' mode is a good shout, and not a hard one since every place has coordinates. It's on the list now. In the meantime, zooming to your area with the filters on gets most of the way there.
Detourmap
@nimet3paw Update: it's live. There's now a Near me button next to Surprise me. It draws a 25 to 200 km ring around you, shows everything inside it at once, and lists the closest first. Your location stays in the browser, nothing is sent anywhere. You're credited in the changelog at detourmap.com/changelog/. Thanks for the push, this was the right call.
love the "surprise me" bias toward obscure over famous, that's the right default for this kind of tool. since it's built off Wikidata, how do you handle places that get edited or delisted after you pull the data - is there a refresh cycle, or does it slowly drift out of date until you re-sync?
Detourmap
@galdayan Good question. Selection is a deterministic filter (a place needs coordinates, a Commons photo and an English Wikipedia article), so a refresh is just re-running the pipeline against Wikidata: new qualifying places appear, deleted or delisted ones drop out. I plan to re-sync roughly monthly. The card blurbs are fetched live from Wikipedia's API though, so descriptions never go stale between syncs.
@flightmussy monthly re-sync is a sane cadence for this. nice that the descriptions pull live so they don't need to wait for the sync too. bookmarking this, going to find a few detour stops for a trip I'm planning
Would love to see a road trip mode that lets you draw a route between two points and shows every detour-worthy spot along the way, sorted by how little extra driving each one adds.
Detourmap
@halimekaraftqj That is the dream feature for something called Detourmap, so I want it too. Ranking spots by how little driving they add needs a proper routing engine, which makes it a bigger build than it sounds, but it's noted and it's the direction I'd like to take this.
Really cool concept, the filters are a nice touch for narrowing things down. One thing that would help me actually use it on the road is offline access or downloadable region packs, since signal can get spotty when you're already out of your way at a remote ruin or waterfall.
Detourmap
@erva914472 You're right, and it stings a little because the moment you need this map most is exactly when you're down to one bar of signal. Proper offline means a PWA build, which I've noted. Until then the whole dataset is CC0 at detourmap.com/data (GeoJSON and CSV), so you can pull a region's worth into GPX or KML for your offline maps app.
The fame filter running from world-famous down to deep-cut hidden gems is the part I'd actually use — most travel maps just drown you in the obvious stuff. When I flip on a few layers and set the fame filter for, say, caves and ruins in Portugal, can I share that exact filtered view as a link so a travel buddy opens the same map state? And is there a way to save pins into a personal list I can pull back up on the trip, or export them to Google Maps for navigation once I'm actually on the road?
70k places is wild, and the country filter actually makes it usable instead of overwhelming. Spent a few minutes hunting for waterfalls in iceland and found three i'd never heard of.
Detourmap
@amineertur23480 Iceland will do that. Which three did you find? If you narrow the fame filter to just Hidden gem it gets even better there, the famous falls drop away and only the properly obscure ones are left.