Higher spots that may be private or access unknown
Check before you go: these may be members-only, for hotel or building guests, or just missing details on the map.
How this works · About & privacy
All heights are estimates. They come from free data that volunteers add and from web pages, so a place can be missing, closed, or on a different floor. Always check with the venue. When we can't work out a height we say "height not known".
Where the places come from. Several free sources, shown as they arrive. Each card says how we found it:
- Web search: this site's server searches the web (Bing, and DuckDuckGo when it lets us in) for "town rooftop bar", "restaurant with a view", "observation deck" and similar, and reads "best rooftop bars" articles. The venue names are then pinned on the map with Photon (OpenStreetMap data); a name is only kept when it matches a real bar, restaurant, hotel or viewpoint inside the circle. These show up within a few seconds.
- Wikivoyage travel-guide listings that mention a rooftop, a view or a top floor; Wikidata observation decks and tall buildings (with their heights); and Wikipedia articles about places with an observation deck or rooftop bar.
- OpenStreetMap: places named "Rooftop", "Sky bar", "Observation deck"…, and (when the busy Overpass servers answer, which can take a minute or fail) every bar, restaurant, café, viewpoint and observation deck with a floor number, on a rooftop, inside a tall building, or on high ground.
How high is it? Each card says how we worked it out:
- Floor from web search: a web page says which floor it's on (e.g. "on the 9th floor").
- Building height (Wikidata): a deck, rooftop or top-floor place in a building Wikidata lists with a height or floor count.
- Tagged floor: the map lists the floor. We count about 3.5 m (11 ft) per floor.
- Floor from the name: the name includes a floor number, like "at the 95th".
- Building height: a rooftop or top-floor place, using the building's mapped height.
- Floors estimate: the building's number of floors × about 3.5 m.
- Terrain: the ground there is higher than the land around it (within about 1 km), from a free elevation model (Open-Meteo, Copernicus 90 m data). We compare the spot with the lower land around it, so it tells you roughly how far you look down. We don't add terrain for places in tall buildings, because the elevation model sees big buildings as hills.
Open to the public? We list public places first, even if they are lower. Bars and restaurants found by web search with their own website or in "best of" lists count as public, as do Wikivoyage listings and observation decks. From the map, a place counts as public when it's a regular bar or restaurant with opening hours, a website, a phone number or a known brand listed, or a public viewpoint, and nothing says otherwise. It goes in the second list if the map marks it private, members-only or a club, if its name says "club", "members", "residents" or "private", or if the map has no hours or website for it (so we can't tell).
Nothing to find here? If web search finds no rooftop or view spots inside the circle, no building is mapped taller than 5 floors, and no place sits notably above the land around it, we say so rather than padding the list.
Privacy. No sign-up, no ads, no tracking. Your location is used only in your browser if you tap â—Ž. The spot you pick (rounded to about 100 m) is sent to this site's server, which looks up the town name and searches the web, Wikivoyage and Wikidata; and from your browser to Photon and Nominatim (to pin names on the map), Open-Meteo (ground heights) and the OpenStreetMap Overpass servers. Results are cached for a few days to spare the free servers.