Mapterhorn terrain tiles

Discover #Mapterhorn by Oliver Wipfli: a collection of global #terrain tiles in the lightweight #PMTiles format, built from open data sources such as Switzerland’s ultra-detailed #swissALTI3D model by #swisstopo. With open-source pipelines, ready-to-use code samples, and a live viewer, Mapterhorn makes it easy to add hillshaded relief and detailed 3D terrain to your webmaps.
Author

Ralph Straumann

Published

September 2, 2025

From Oliver Wipfli comes Mapterhorn1, a collection of terrain tiles in PMTiles format compiled from open data sources. In Switzerland, Mapterhorn uses swissALTI3D, swisstopo’s high-resolution (0.5 meters!) terrain data. For the rest of the world, it currently relies on the Copernicus DEM at 30 meters resolution. The roadmap lists further high-resolution datasets that are scheduled to be added to Mapterhorn.

You can check out the available data using the Mapterhorn viewer.

The real deal

There are code samples using MapLibre that demonstrate how Mapterhorn can be used to add a hill-shaded relief to a webmap or 3D terrain and hillshading to an OpenStreetMap raster map. And Oliver has made the code behind Mapterhorn, including its data processing pipelines, open-source under the BSD-3 licence.

Footnotes

  1. A pun on “map” and the famous Matterhorn.↩︎