Whale-watching trips in Iceland often start from a harbour that is also part of a working town centre. The boat operator is usually easy to find. The less obvious part is what the map tells a visitor about the last 600 metres: toilets, parking, bus stops and visitor information.
I pulled a small OpenStreetMap snapshot around five departure areas that travellers commonly use: Reykjavík Old Harbour, Akureyri, Húsavík, Dalvík and Hólmavík. This is not a field survey and zero does not mean a feature is absent on the ground. It only means the feature was not returned with the selected tags inside the chosen radius at the snapshot time.
The snapshot
Data timestamp: 2026-07-25 13:25 UTC
Search radius: 600 metres from each harbour point
Data is © OpenStreetMap contributors and available under the Open Database Licence.
Harbour area Toilets Parking features Bus stops Visitor information Reykjavík Old Harbour 3 101 23 11 Akureyri harbour 0 46 17 7 Húsavík harbour 2 65 4 0 Dalvík harbour 1 12 1 0 Hólmavík harbour 0 7 0 2The parking column needs care. OpenStreetMap may contain a separate way for each small parking area, and a mapped feature is not the same thing as a confirmed visitor space for a whale-watching departure. The numbers describe mapping density, not capacity.
The same warning applies to toilets. None of the returned toilet features had a name=* tag. That may be perfectly reasonable, but a traveller cannot infer opening hours, access rules or whether a toilet belongs to a nearby business from this count alone.
What looks worth checking locally
The zeroes are the most useful part of this exercise, provided they are treated as questions rather than corrections.
Akureyri and Hólmavík returned no amenity=toilets features inside the radius. Húsavík and Dalvík returned no tourism=information features. Hólmavík returned no highway=bus_stop feature.
There are several possible explanations:
- the feature is genuinely outside 600 metres;
- it exists but uses a different valid tagging pattern;
- it is inside a building and not separately mapped;
- access is seasonal or private;
- the harbour point I used is not the best centre for the departure area;
- or the map simply needs an update.
Someone with recent local knowledge can answer those questions far better than a remote query. I have deliberately not added or changed map data from this audit.
Reykjavík also shows why raw counts are not enough. Twenty-three bus-stop nodes inside 600 metres sounds generous, but visitors still need to know which stop serves their route, whether the walking line is sensible with luggage and how early they should arrive. That belongs in a travel plan, not in an OSM tag.
Reproducing the query
I used one block like this for each coordinate and combined the results. Replace LAT,LON with the harbour point you want to test:
[out:json][timeout:45];
(
nwr(around:600,LAT,LON)[amenity=toilets];
nwr(around:600,LAT,LON)[amenity=parking];
nwr(around:600,LAT,LON)[highway=bus_stop];
nwr(around:600,LAT,LON)[tourism=information];
);
out center tags;
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The centre points used were:
- Reykjavík Old Harbour:
64.1502, -21.9423 - Akureyri harbour:
65.6854, -18.0905 - Húsavík harbour:
66.0449, -17.3389 - Dalvík harbour:
65.9700, -18.5307 - Hólmavík harbour:
65.7043, -21.6690
For ways and relations I measured from the returned centre point. A feature could therefore cross the 600-metre boundary even when its centre falls outside it, or the reverse. This is another reason to use the table as a prompt for inspection, not as a completeness score.
Mapping data and trip planning have different jobs
OSM is the right place to describe verifiable physical features. A traveller-facing guide has a different job: comparing departure towns, likely trip lengths, seasons and the practical trade-offs between Reykjavík and North Iceland.
For that separate planning layer, we maintain an Iceland whale-watching planning guide. It is not a source for OSM edits. The link is included so readers can see the traveller question that prompted this mapping audit.
If you map in any of these towns, the most useful follow-up would be a quick local check of the zero-count categories, including access and seasonal details where they can be verified. Even confirming that the current map is accurate would make the limits of this snapshot clearer.
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