Building Footprints of Costa Rica from OpenStreetMap

OpenStreetMap provides building footprints across Costa Rica, tagged from residential homes to hospitals and schools. Coverage reflects volunteer mapper activity, with urban areas likely well-represented and remote areas potentially sparse. The data is maintained by the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team and was last updated on 2026-06-27.

Use Cases

• Estimate population distribution based on building density and type.
• Assess potential damage from natural disasters using building location and footprint data.
• Plan urban development and infrastructure projects by analyzing existing building coverage.

Strengths

• Includes diverse building types such as residential homes, hospitals, schools, and places of worship.
• Available in multiple geospatial file formats including GEOPACKAGE, SHP, and JSON.
• Derived from OpenStreetMap, a free, collaborative global mapping project.

Limitations

• Coverage is uneven, with urban areas likely well-represented and remote areas potentially sparse.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.

Provenance

Source

OpenStreetMap

Collection Method

Volunteer geographic information (VGI) collected by mappers.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-06-27 02:48:51.220605; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Costa Rica