Sources and licences

Our articles are written by us. The facts behind them are drawn from open data sources:

• Wikidata — country facts such as capitals, population, currencies and languages (CC0).
• OpenStreetMap — opening hours, locations and other map data. © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database Licence (ODbL).
• UN M49 — world regions used to group countries.
• Wikimedia Commons — photographs. The author and licence of each photo are given in its caption.
• World Bank Open Data — economic and population indicators (CC BY 4.0).
• OurAirports — airports with scheduled flights, used for the nearest airport (public domain).
• Wikivoyage — which places travellers visit, plus short practical details such as prices and addresses, taken as facts.
• CHELSA — monthly temperature and rainfall averages for 1981–2010 (CHELSA v2.1, CC0; read on a 4 km grid). Karger, D.N. et al. (2017) Climatologies at high resolution for the earth's land surface areas. Scientific Data 4, 170122; data: EnviDat, doi:10.16904/envidat.228.v2.1.
• NASA POWER — rainy days per month, and temperatures where CHELSA has no land data. These data were obtained from the NASA Langley Research Center (LaRC) POWER Project funded through the NASA Earth Science/Applied Science Program; daily data (API v2.10), 2015–2024, accessed 2026-10-13.
• Wikipedia page views — how often each place is looked up in a year, used to rank sights.

Countries and territories

We list as countries the member states of the United Nations and the UN observer states. Other places with their own ISO 3166 code, or otherwise of interest to travellers, are listed as territories. This classification follows the United Nations and implies no position on any territorial or political dispute.