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When travelling for a long period of time, refilling water bottles can be a challenge. This is particularly true for long overland public transportation journeys in summer, as one cannot easily carry as much water as when travelling by car.

The availability of public drinking water fountains varies widely between countries and cities, as does information about such fountains. The topic regularly comes up on this site:

I'm looking for a generic solution to this problem.

Is there any website or smartphone application that travellers can use internationally to locate a source of (free) drinking water? I'm aware the data would probably have to be crowd-sourced. Openstreetmap has Tag:amenity=drinking_water, Tag:man_made=drinking_fountain, and Tag:drinking_water=yes, but I don't know how to easily search for such categories while travelling, and there may be more complete sources that I'm unaware of.

(The safety of such water is a separate issue that I will consider out of the scope of this question.)

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With a web-based Openstreetmap interface, one can use taginfo.openstreetmap.org. For example, here is the taginfo for amenity=drinking_water. From there, one can click on Overpass turbo in the top right to be directed to https://overpass-turbo.eu/. Pan and zoom the map to the area of interest and click Run.

For example, this is the result near Barcelona Sants station:

Screenshot of overpass-turbo

Or in central Frankfurt, where Openstreetmap contains no results near the main train station:

enter image description here

Through the export-button, you can download a GPX file that you can download into a handheld GNSS-capable device.

Relevant comment by nrainer:

If you are using OsmAnd you can also show the information on the map by searching for "drinking water" and clicking on the button "show on map".

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    As with most, if not all OSM features, the coverage is only sporadic and data quality difficult to predict. I checked a few areas I know fairly well and no water sources were mapped, although I know several. I don't think this is a particularly good suggestion if you are looking for a generic solution.
    – Tor-Einar Jarnbjo
    Commented Dec 10, 2019 at 17:25
  • OpenCYCLEmap shows drinking water by default, from the same dataset (maybe the similar question I mentioned above was at bicycles.stackexchange.com and that's why I can't find it here)
    – Chris H - UK
    Commented Dec 10, 2019 at 17:51
  • @Tor-EinarJarnbjo I'd be happy to get other solutions, even if those are only more complete than OSM in certain regions.
    – gerrit
    Commented Dec 10, 2019 at 17:58
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    If you are using OsmAnd you can also show the information on the map by searching for "drinking water" and clicking on the button "show on map".
    – nrainer
    Commented Dec 9, 2021 at 18:42
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    @nrainer Thanks; I have included this information in the answer.
    – gerrit
    Commented Dec 10, 2021 at 8:41

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