Bivaq is the map of places you can sleep when there is nothing to book.
Unguarded shelters, bivouac boxes, lean-tos, caves, emergency shelters, staffed huts and wild spots. Across Europe, on one map.
Why it exists
The information exists. It's just everywhere.
Shelters live in national portals, club databases, PDFs and forum threads, each in whichever language the region speaks, and some of those pages haven't been touched in years. You don't learn a shelter is gone until you're standing where it used to be.
One place, assembled: its type read from OpenStreetMap, its walls inferred from that type rather than read, its elevation from Copernicus terrain, its capacity from refuges.info. Its current status and the bivouac rules where it stands: not known, and not mapped. The map says all six of those things, including the two it cannot answer.
What's on the map
Places, the trails between them, and what you need to get through the night.
Places to sleep
Staffed huts, unguarded shelters, bivouac boxes, lean-tos, caves, emergency shelters and wild spots. The type is on every pin, so a hut you have to book never reads as a shelter you can walk into.
Trails, mapped around the night
Long-distance routes traced through the places along them: what is on route, how far apart they sit, where the longest gap falls.
What's around a place
Water sources and whether the water is drinkable. Access and elevation. Where bivouacking is allowed, restricted or forbidden, with the source and the date it was checked.
Provenance
Named sources, on every place.
Almost every place on this map began as an OpenStreetMap node, under ODbL — the same data the rest of the open mapping world runs on. French shelters cross-link their refuges.info record, and a set of Italian huts took their stove, bedding and capacity details from there, under CC BY-SA. Photographs come from Wikimedia Commons: linked from Wikimedia, never re-hosted here, every one naming its author and its licence. Elevations the source data was missing were filled from the Copernicus GLO-30 satellite terrain model, and are marked as derived rather than surveyed.
It goes down to the individual fact. Where we know which source a particular fact came from, the place page says so beside it — including the ones Bivaq inferred from the OpenStreetMap type rather than read there, which we label as inferred, because a guess presented as a reading is worse than no answer.
Every place page names its own sources. The full register, including what we reject and why, is on Sources.
What we don't know
A dot on the map is not a promise.
Bivaq has not visited these places. Nearly all of this is drawn from open data, and open data goes stale quietly — nothing on a map re-checks itself.
A pin is not a guarantee the place still stands.
Roofs come off. Huts burn, get demolished, get locked, get pulled down over a winter nobody recorded.
A pin is not a guarantee you can reach it.
Access turns with the season, the snow and the landowner.
A pin is not permission.
Whether a place exists and whether you may sleep in it are separate questions. We map the second one separately, and only where we can answer it.
So where we don't know, the map says so, instead of leaving a blank. A blank reads as permission, and it isn't one. That is the part we will defend: not that every fact has been verified, but that where a fact came from sits next to the fact — including when the honest answer is that we inferred it, or that nobody has recorded it at all.
What we stand for
Free where it's safety.
Coordinates, water, status and the legality overview never sit behind a paywall. That isn't a launch offer.
For people who go.
Trekkers, bikepackers and runners who walk until dark and then need a roof. Not brochures.
Honest about reality.
We would rather show you an old fact with its date on it than a confident one we invented.
Respect the place.
Pack out your rubbish. Leave the wood. Leave it better than you found it.
Where it came from
Bivaq is a solo project, built out of real trips rather than a boardroom. It started with a dozen browser tabs open before every trip, trying to answer one question: where can I sleep out there? No team, no investors, no one to please but the people who use it.
Questions
Good to know.
Yes, and the parts that matter for safety stay free permanently: the map, search, precise coordinates, water locations and whether the water is drinkable, current status, the bivouac legality overview, and the full trip planner. Bivaq+ will add comfort and depth later — offline maps, GPX export, unlimited trips, curated tips, full photo galleries. It has no price and nothing to buy yet.
No. A place being on this map means it exists in our data, and nothing more. Bivouac rules are set regionally and we map them separately — Slovakia today, with the source and the date shown on each region. Where we haven't mapped the rules, the map says so rather than implying it's fine. Check locally before you rely on it.
Almost every place began as an OpenStreetMap node. French and Italian shelters add detail from refuges.info, photographs come from Wikimedia Commons, and elevations we were missing came from Copernicus satellite terrain. Every place page names its own sources; the full register is on Sources.
It varies, and the map tells you which. Where a fact carries a date, you see the date. Where nothing has confirmed a place recently, it says that instead of looking fresh. Condition reports are open to anyone who's been there — the map doesn't pretend they've been filled in.
Report it from the place itself: a condition, a photo, a correction, or a place we're missing entirely. For the underlying record, fixing it on OpenStreetMap reaches everyone, not only us.
Mostly no, and the app tells you so instead of failing silently. Installed, it falls back to a page that says what is unavailable, and a few informational pages stay readable. The map, shelters, trails and trips all need a connection — no tiles or place data are stored on your device. Offline maps are a planned Bivaq+ feature, not a built one.