How to Find Green Spaces Near You Using Google Maps

Let’s walk through the process of how to find green spaces, nature and parks near you.

Explore!

One of the best and most obvious ways to find green spaces near you is to go explore! Get outside, take long walks, ride your bicycle, even driving around. Follow the natural features of the area: so for example rivers, oceans, mountains, hills, and any streams or forests.

Google Maps

Now the next way is using the Internet and technology to help us out.

So let's log on to Google Maps. I'm in San Francisco and we are lucky to have a ton of nature and green spaces. You’ll you'll see that they're highlighted in green on the map.

If you searched for a “park” near you, you'd see that a lot of the green spaces were highlighted by this search, but a lot of things don't pop up for a simple search like that.

What we can do is change how our map is viewed and one of the views is called “terrain.” Now this is great because you can actually see a topographic map of San Francisco. You can see what kind of hills are available, you see there's a whole cluster south of the city that looks like a great place to venture.

Now let's look at a different city that may not have the same natural features of San Francisco. I'm gonna pick a random city: Kansas City.

When I look at the map of Kansas City, it looks like there are a lot of natural features. There's the Missouri river running through the city and like there's a little shoot-off of the Kansas River.

Okay, so those are the first natural features I look at. Anytime there is a river like this, you're probably gonna have green spaces around it and most cities are built around a fresh water source.

There's looks to be a few parks that are a riverfront parks that are along the Missouri River. The map doesn't show any green spaces here but if we turn on the “satellite" view, this whole area is a forest.

Those of you who are actually living in Kansas City or have visited, let me know if this is really a place to hang out in or if it's totally off limits but I would at least go check it out and see what's going on.

Another helpful trick to use on Google Maps: bicycles will show you where it's usually safe to get away from cars, and that's usually a good sign there’s nature. So let's turn on the “bicycle” view and you'll see there's a couple trails. Normally when there's clusters of bike trail like this, you'll see that there's a lot of access to nature. This area would be a really good place to explore if I were in the area.

So I hope that helped you explore your neighborhood and get an idea of the green spaces around you. Even if you're going on a trip or discovering somewhere new, just take a look at the map and see what opportunities there are to explore nature.

Let me know if you have any questions or if I can help you out in any way. For sure if you're from Kansas City or been there, let me know if any of these spaces that we went over today are actually accessible.

Until next time,

Outdoor Goyo, OUT!