Sources and method

Boundaries, coastlines and capitals: Natural Earth (public domain) · Official languages: Unicode CLDR · Maps: Copernicus GLO-90 relief, ESA WorldCover 2021 land cover (CC BY 4.0), Sentinel-2 cloudless 2016 photography (CC BY 4.0), GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) and Wikidata (CC0) toponymy. No data under ODbL.

Where the names come from

Three open sources, joined by identifier and never by character string: Natural Earth (public domain), GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) and Wikidata (CC0).

Two sources that agree make a publishable name. One alone is not enough. When they contradict each other, or neither speaks, the original name stays — which is the right answer for most places in the world: they have no exonym, and inventing one would be a mistake.

What isn't used

No data under a share-alike licence — no OpenStreetMap. Everything used here is public domain or under a simple attribution requirement, and that attribution is printed on every map.

The relief

Copernicus GLO-90 elevation model (90 m), ESA WorldCover 2021 land cover (10 m). The hypsometric tints, the shading and the forests come straight from them — nothing is hand-painted.

Not a pixel

The relief is not an image stretched over the sheet: the elevation bands and the shading come out as closed polygons, smoothed into curves. Zoom in as far as you like, there's no staircase to find — except on the satellite views, which are images by nature.

The drawings

Three families, and they don't look alike: the state-survey map (chromolithography, engraving, shading, contour lines), the satellite view computed from ten-metre land cover, and the drawn map, where forests become trees, peaks become chevrons and towns become houses.