Actually, failed is too strong a word. Annoyed or disappointed is better.

I am on a vacation in Bilbao which is a lovely city with friendly people, photogenic streets and very good food. But I can’t use Osmand or Maps.me to find streets named in any of the tourist guides of even by the locals including the very nice staff at our hotel.

Why? Because the directions are in always in Spanish/Castilian and a year or so ago the many of the name=* tags for the streets here were edited to remove the Spanish names and have only the Basque names.

I have been consciously observing street signs and they are consistently are in both Basque and Spanish. Usually with Spanish on top. It is my understanding that OSM multilingual tagging calls for having all languages on the signs tagged. I have no issue with replacing the Spanish with Basque on the default name=* tags. But the Spanish names should have been put into name:es=* tags. That would allow visitors like myself a chance at a much better experience.

Imagine being able to find the street given to you by a friendly local who assumes, correctly, that you speak no Basque.

Not that it would have helped much with Maps.me as I don’t see any setting in that app to specify display or search on anything other than the default name=* tag. Osmand does have a setting for specifying the language but I don’t know how well it works as the data is not in OSM for it to work with.

So here I am with a wonderful looking OSM based maps with an amazing number of points of interest. And I have apps that can give me detailed directions once I figure out where I want to go. But I am reduced to using Google to find my destination and then I need to compare the street geometry to see where the location is on my OSM based map.

Maybe not a “fail” for OSM, but definitely annoying and disappointing.