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Quickstart

Explore in the browser​

The Explorer site is the fastest way to browse Overture data and inspect the schema. No installation, no account. Click any feature to view its properties. Download visible data as GeoJSON.

Download by area of interest​

Install Overture's Python client and download building footprints for a specific area:

pip install overturemaps

overturemaps download \
  --bbox=-71.068,42.353,-71.058,42.363 \
  -f geojson \
  --type=building \
  -o boston_buildings.geojson

The tool reads directly from Overture's cloud-hosted GeoParquet and transfers only the data inside your bounding box.

Query with DuckDB​

DuckDB lets you query Overture's GeoParquet files with SQL. Install DuckDB, then:

INSTALL spatial;
INSTALL httpfs;

LOAD spatial;

SET s3_region = 'us-west-2';

COPY(
  SELECT
    id,
    names.primary as name,
    categories.primary as category,
    addresses[1].freeform as address,
    geometry
  FROM read_parquet(
    's3://overturemaps-us-west-2/release/2026-02-18.0/theme=places/type=place/*',
    filename=true, hive_partitioning=1)
  WHERE
    names.primary ILIKE '%wawa%'
    AND bbox.xmin BETWEEN -76.5 AND -74.5
    AND bbox.ymin BETWEEN 39.5 AND 40.5
) TO 'wawa_stores.geojson' WITH (FORMAT GDAL, DRIVER 'GeoJSON');

This extracts Wawa convenience stores in the Philadelphia area and saves them as GeoJSON.

Get the latest release​

Overture publishes a STAC catalog that always points to the latest release. Query it with DuckDB instead of hardcoding release paths:

SET VARIABLE latest = (
    SELECT latest FROM 'https://stac.overturemaps.org/catalog.json'
);

Browse all release artifacts in the STAC viewer. The Python client uses the STAC catalog automatically.

Next steps​

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