VAN-COMPARATOR Guide
How many motorhome aires are there in France? The 2026 count
3,575 aires recorded in OpenStreetMap as of July 2026: share of free aires, median capacity, services, largest sites — the full count, every figure sourced.
How many motorhome aires does France actually have? Working from data © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL), July 2026 extract, we count 3,575 stopover and service aires across the country — the very sites that power our motorhome aire directory, with one page per aire.
Where these numbers come from
OpenStreetMap is a collaborative map: every aire is described field by field (capacity, water, electricity, disposal, pricing) by local contributors. Two consequences for reading the figures below. First, a missing field means “unknown”, not “no” — so we always state how many aires actually carry each piece of information. Second, the quality of crowdsourced geodata is a genuine research topic: Mordechai Haklay’s foundational work, published in 2010 in Environment and Planning B (Google Scholar page), showed OpenStreetMap rivalling official mapping agencies in well-covered areas, and a 2017 study by Barrington-Leigh and Millard-Ball in PLoS ONE (DOI) already estimated OSM’s global road network to be more than 80% complete. France is among the best-mapped countries of all.
The key numbers for the French network
| Indicator | Value | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Aires recorded | 3,575 | whole of France |
| Free aires | 1,933 — 57% | 3,366 aires with pricing recorded |
| Paid aires | 1,433 — 43% | 3,366 aires with pricing recorded |
| Median capacity | 10 pitches | 2,465 aires with capacity recorded |
| Water available | 2,255 aires — 98% | 2,309 aires with the field recorded |
| Waste disposal | 2,298 aires — 85% | 2,703 aires with the field recorded |
| Electricity | 1,656 aires — 67% | 2,466 aires with the field recorded |
Two findings stand out. First, most French aires are still free — 57% of those with known pricing, a figure we unpack in our free vs paid aires analysis. Second, the network is built of small sites: half of the recorded aires offer 10 pitches or fewer, as our review of aire capacity shows.
The largest aires in the country
At the other end of the scale, the largest recorded capacity belongs to the Puy du Fou aire in the Vendée: 650 pitches, nearly three times the runner-up, the Le Goulet aire in Leucate (230 pitches). The full top 15 — overwhelmingly coastal — is covered in our ranking of France’s 15 largest aires.
What about a ranking by département?
Statistical honesty first: the postcode is recorded for only 438 of the 3,575 aires in OpenStreetMap — 12% of the network — so no reliable national ranking of départements can be drawn from it. Within that subsample, Aveyron and Landes lead with 23 recorded aires each, ahead of Gironde (17) — but that says as much about local mapping activity as about reality on the ground. To find aires around a specific city, our geographic hubs — for instance around Vannes — are far more dependable: they rely on GPS coordinates, present for 100% of aires.
What counts as an “aire”?
Our count aggregates everything OpenStreetMap identifies as dedicated motorhome infrastructure: pure service aires (a water point and a drain, sometimes with no overnight stay), stopover aires where you sleep, and mixed sites combining both — the most common set-up. Campsites, merely tolerated car parks and wild-camping spots are excluded: these are facilities built for leisure vehicles. One reassuring technical point about the dataset’s reliability: while the descriptive fields (capacity, services, pricing) are unevenly filled in, GPS coordinates are present for 100% of the 3,575 aires — which is what allows our geographic hubs and maps to be exhaustive even where an individual aire’s details remain to be documented. It also means every figure in this article can be checked, aire by aire, in the public database.
What it means for your trip
With 3,575 aires, France runs the densest stopover network in Europe: in practice you are almost never more than an hour’s drive from one. Our guide to motorhome aires explains how they work, and every page in our directory lists the known services — never inventing what contributors have not recorded.
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