I just got back from a holiday in Brazil. We were over there with the new baby, so we hadn’t planned anything too ambitious travel wise. Just visiting the family in São Paulo. I should say in Guaruhlos, which is a smaller big city inside of, or outside of the massive city of São Paulo, depending on who you ask (It’s really all part of the same sprawling concrete jungle)

So I didn’t manage to organise an OpenStreetMap meet-up this time, but while changing nappies and bumming around on the internet I took at a look at the attractions of Guaruhlos according to various internet listings. There aren’t many, but there is… a zoo! My wife didn’t even know about it and neither did wikivoyage… neither did OpenStreetMap :-O

Of course I insisted we go there, and so now, to my surprise, I have had the opportunity to bag a missing zoo in OpenStreetMap! Naturally I also had to map out all the different animal cages. That’s the standard OpenStreetMap zoo treatment which the Berlin Zoo mappers started I think. I haven’t mapped the details quite down to Edinburgh Zoo levels, and some of my positioning of things under the trees may need a bit of tweaking, but… behold Zoológico Municipal Guarulhos!

The tag for the different zoo animals seems to be tourism=attraction + attraction=animal. and the name tag for the name of the animal of course. Which would be weird if you just plotted a map of where all tourism=attractions are :-) I put Portuguese names in (from the zoo signs) but also name:en tags so you can have an english map of the zoo if you want.

I also added the zoo to WikiVoyage’s ‘Guarulhos’ page. WikiVoyage has some quite nice OpenStreetMap integration these days. You can easily set coordinates on all the listings, and they appear on a marker map. Not sure how long that wikimedia base-map takes to re-render, but… tourists don’t visit Guarulhos very often. When they do, we’ll be ready!

I’m back in London now without my wife and baby for two weeks. I’ll miss them terribly of course but… I’M FREE! Time for some London pub meet-ups!