Aires in France: what they are, and how to find one tonight

An aire de camping-car is a stopover built for motorhomes rather than a campsite. Most are a parking area with a service point: fresh water, a drain for grey water and a chemical toilet disposal. Many are free, many charge a few euros, and they are usually meant for a night or two rather than a holiday.

They are the reason touring France by motorhome works the way it does. The difficulty has never been that aires are rare. It is that no single app shows all of them.

Why most apps show you about half

There are two separate populations of aire, mapped by different people. OpenStreetMap has the ones contributors have surveyed. France's regional tourist offices publish a different set through DATAtourisme, the national tourism database, and those are not in OpenStreetMap.

We measured the overlap before building anything. At a 50 metre matching radius, only 18% of the tourist-office aires were already present as OpenStreetMap sites. The rest were new.

3,339

aires from the French national tourism database

2,740

of those not in OpenStreetMap at all

~5,390

total once both sources are merged

Counts read from Radar's own database on 11 August 2026. They move a little as the source updates.

What you get told

Coverage on its own is not much use if every pin is just a dot. Of the tourist-office aires, 2,062 carry a description, which is usually where the opening season, the price and whether there is a service point are written, and 1,634 link to their own website.

Services are tagged separately where the source states them, so you can search for the thing you actually need: 164 are recorded as having a dump station and 107 as having toilets. Those are the ones the publisher was explicit about, so treat them as a floor rather than the full picture.

Find one near you

Radar shows both sets on one map, along with fuel prices, drinking water, dump stations and the rest of what you need on the road. Free, worldwide, and no account needed to search.

Open aires in France on the map

Where this comes from

The aires come from DATAtourisme, the French national tourism database, published under Licence Ouverte 2.0, plus OpenStreetMap contributors. Every source Radar uses is listed with its licence on the data sources page.

Opening seasons, prices and services change, and an aire can close. The publisher is the authority on any individual site, which is what the website links are for.