Overture Maps MCP server

Query Overture Maps data — places (POIs), buildings and administrative divisions — directly from Claude and other MCP-compatible LLM tools.

This is a local (stdio) MCP server that wraps the Overture Maps API. Responses are compact summaries rather than full GeoJSON, so they stay token-efficient, and the tools steer toward cheap, well-scoped queries.

Tools

Tool	What it does
search_places	Search POIs/businesses by lat/lng+radius (country-wide on paid plans), filtered by category, taxonomy, brand or contact details.
list_place_categories	List available place categories (with counts) for a country or area — use to find valid categories values.
list_place_countries	List every country in the dataset with place/brand counts.
search_divisions	Look up administrative divisions (countries, regions, counties, localities) by name or location.
find_buildings	Find building footprints near a point (id, distance, height/levels).

Every tool is read-only: each declares readOnlyHint, destructiveHint: false, idempotentHint and openWorldHint, so clients can call them without a confirmation step.

Get an API key

Sign up at account.overturemapsapi.com for a free API key and set it as OVERTURE_API_KEY. The public DEMO-API-KEY works for light testing near a few demo cities (New York, London, Paris, Bondi Beach). Country-wide place searches (a country with no lat/lng) need a paid plan.

Note: the Free tier is for non-commercial use. Commercial use needs a paid plan.

Use with Claude Desktop

Add this to your claude_desktop_config.json (Settings → Developer → Edit Config):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "overture-maps": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@thatapicompany/overture-maps-mcp"],
      "env": {
        "OVERTURE_API_KEY": "your-api-key-here"
      }
    }
  }
}

Restart Claude Desktop. You can then ask things like:

• "Find cafes within 500m of the Eiffel Tower."
• "List every used car dealer in the UK that has a website."
• "What administrative region is Springfield in?"
• "How many places does Overture have for Bermuda?"

Use with other MCP clients

Any client that supports local stdio MCP servers works the same way — run npx -y @thatapicompany/overture-maps-mcp with OVERTURE_API_KEY in the environment.

Local development

npm install
npm run build
npm test
OVERTURE_API_KEY=your-key node dist/index.js

Releasing

Releases publish to npm from GitHub Actions with trusted publishing, so no npm token is needed, and then list the same version in the official MCP Registry as io.github.thatapicompany/overture-maps-mcp (GitHub OIDC, no secret needed; metadata in server.json). Bump version in package.json, merge to main, then publish a GitHub release tagged v<version> (for example v0.1.3). The workflow checks the tag matches, builds, runs the tests and publishes with provenance.

Environment variables

Variable	Default	Purpose
OVERTURE_API_KEY	DEMO-API-KEY	Your Overture Maps API key.
OVERTURE_API_BASE	https://api.overturemapsapi.com	Override for staging/self-hosted deployments.

License

MIT