New Open Basemaps for Austria

For many years now, we have been enjoying the basemap.at service with it’s various basemap options (color, gray, with/without labels, …) in WMTS and vector tiles.

For a few weeks now, there is an additional service by BEV: Their cartographic models “Kartographischen Modelle (KM)” are now available as raster (KM-R) in COG-TIFF format.

The downloads come with proper instructions:

• KM_QGIS_Anleitung_202603 including tips to switch to bilinear resampling for better rendering:

Some vector (KM-V) in GeoPackages with QGIS projects providing the layer style and label settings are already available for the Stichtag 30.01.2026 downloads. And they look awesome:

KM-V downloads are provided in tiles, so it’s not quite as simple as grabbing the COG URI:

It’s worth noting though, that the KM-V GeoPackages are still a work in progress and not all tiles are available for download yet.

I’ll keep an eye on the downloads to see when the rest of the tiles become available.

Until then, I leave you with a couple of examples of the Großglockner (highest mountain in Austria) area in basemap.at and KM-R side-by-side: