Discover the cultural gems in Europe’s cities through open data

What makes a place part of a city’s cultural life? Alongside well-known landmarks, local knowledge can reveal places that visitors might otherwise overlook.  Cultural Gems, an initiative developed by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, brought together contributions from cities, universities, organisations and individuals to document cultural and creative places across Europe.

Launched in 2018, the project combined information from OpenStreetMap with contributions from its partners and users. The contributors’ dataset remains available for download. It contains contributions collected between 2018 and 2023, preserving local knowledge for further exploration. The Cultural gems ontology dataset is available on the European Data Portal. These contributions offer a view of cities through the cultural places that people chose to share, adding a local perspective to the collection.

Open data offers new ways to discover and understand cultural places. By reusing the Cultural Gems collection, researchers, educators and developers can study how these places are distributed across cities, create maps or develop learning materials. Making the records available for reuse allows local knowledge to support new projects and bring attention to places that might otherwise be overlooked.

Curious about the cultural places recorded across Europe? Visit the Cultural Gems project page to learn how the collection was built, or explore the contributors’ dataset for your next research, learning or mapping project. 

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