Offline map of Tyrol for hiking: districts and sizes
Tyrol's nine districts measured: how big each map and its terrain are to download, which ones a trip from Innsbruck needs, and how to test them offline.
· Malik · 7 min read
The map of Innsbruck-Land, the district around Innsbruck, is a 35 MB download. The heights of the ground under it are 184 MB, five times as much. Whether a download fits in an evening on hotel Wi-Fi depends far more on the terrain than on the map.
I measured all nine districts of Tyrol with the same size check that walker, the walk, hike and ride tracker I make for Android, runs before a download. The numbers below are walker's. Other apps pack their maps in other ways, so their files have other sizes. The questions hold for any app: which regions to take, how large they are, and how to know they work before you lose signal.
Why a map should be on the phone before you leave, and what an offline map can and can't do, is in hiking with offline maps on Android. This post is the concrete case for one trip to Tyrol: what to download at home, so that the map is there in every valley you walk into, even where the phone has no signal.
Tyrol's nine districts, measured
Tyrol has nine districts: eight in North Tyrol and Lienz, which is East Tyrol. Each is a map region of its own in walker, and so is the whole state.
| Region | Map | Terrain |
|---|---|---|
| Imst | 28 MB | 214 MB |
| Innsbruck-Land | 35 MB | 184 MB |
| Innsbruck-Stadt | 7 MB | 14 MB |
| Kitzbühel | 41 MB | 155 MB |
| Kufstein | 34 MB | 133 MB |
| Landeck | 23 MB | 172 MB |
| Lienz | 29 MB | 225 MB |
| Reutte | 32 MB | 182 MB |
| Schwaz | 44 MB | 243 MB |
| All nine districts | 273 MB | 1.5 GB |
| Tyrol, the whole state | 248 MB | 1.5 GB |
The map is OpenStreetMap from the build of 28 September 2026. OpenStreetMap changes every day, so a later download differs a little. The sizes are in decimal megabytes, as Android counts them.
A region's download covers the rectangle around it, which is larger than the district. The dashed box in the figure is Innsbruck-Land's: it holds the whole city of Innsbruck and strips of the neighbouring districts. That is why the state as one download is smaller than all nine districts added up. The districts' rectangles overlap, and the state's rectangle holds each place once. For a walk, it means the map usually reaches past the district's border into the next one, so a path over a ridge doesn't leave the map at the border itself. Where the map really stops, the flight-mode test below shows.
Which districts a trip needs
A base in Innsbruck
If you stay in or near Innsbruck, start with Innsbruck-Land. Its rectangle contains Innsbruck-Stadt entirely, so the city needs no download of its own. It also covers the Stubai valley, the Wipptal up to the Brenner and the Seefeld plateau. The four demo walks on this blog, on the Nordkette, the Patscherkofel, above Hötting and around the Lanser Kopf, all lie inside it.
Day trips into the valleys
Then add the district of every valley you might drive to. The Zillertal and the Achensee are in Schwaz, the Ötztal is in Imst, and St. Anton am Arlberg is in Landeck. A week in Innsbruck with days in the Zillertal and the Ötztal is three districts: Innsbruck-Land, Schwaz and Imst. Their maps come to 107 MB, and with terrain to 747 MB.
Take one valley more than you plan for. Weather changes plans, and the valley you add on the day is the one without a map if you left it out.
When the whole state is simpler
If your days spread over most of the state, take Tyrol as one region instead. Its map is 248 MB, less than the nine districts together, and its terrain 1.5 GB, just under theirs. Up to seven districts, the districts are the smaller download. With the whole state, no valley is left out, and a change of plan on the day never leaves you without a map.
Why the terrain is the big part
A map region holds paths, roads, huts and names. The terrain holds the height of the ground, and in Tyrol walker takes it in fine detail: a height about every 3 m, all over the state. That is why the terrain is roughly four to eight times the size of the map in every district but the small city one, where it is twice.
The terrain is optional. The map shows every path without it. It gives you two things. The heights of your walks get more accurate, so their climb and highest point come out closer to the real ones. And hillshading and contour lines show the slopes, so you can see on the map where a path gets steep. For high routes and for reading a valley before you walk into it, it is worth its size. For walks along a lake it can wait.
How long the download takes
The time is the size in megabytes, times eight for bits, divided by the speed in megabits per second. The table assumes two speeds: 10 Mbit/s, a hotel Wi-Fi shared with a full house, and 50 Mbit/s, good broadband at home or a strong mobile connection. It counts the bytes alone; a slow server makes it longer.
| Download | Size | At 10 Mbit/s | At 50 Mbit/s |
|---|---|---|---|
| Innsbruck-Land, map | 35 MB | 28 s | 6 s |
| Innsbruck-Land, map and terrain | 219 MB | 3 min | 35 s |
| Innsbruck-Land, Schwaz and Imst, map and terrain | 747 MB | 10 min | 2 min |
| Tyrol, map and terrain | 1.8 GB | 24 min | 5 min |
Even on slow Wi-Fi, three districts with terrain take about ten minutes. On mobile data the volume matters more than the time, because all 747 MB count against your data plan. Download at home before you travel, or on the first evening on Wi-Fi. What roaming costs is in the offline maps post.
Test it in flight mode
Test the evening before your first walk, while you still have Wi-Fi to fix what is missing:
- Turn on flight mode.
- Open the map where you are staying and zoom in until you see single paths.
- Scroll to each car park or valley station you plan to start from, and along each route to its highest point.
- Scroll past the edge of your last district, so you know where the map stops before you get there.
- If you downloaded terrain, switch to the layer with hillshading and check that the slopes are there.
A grey or empty patch means that part isn't on the phone. Add the region now, then run the test again.
How walker does it
In walker, open Map packs → Add region and zoom in on Tyrol until the districts show. Tap Innsbruck-Land, which walker labels District in Tyrol, Austria, then Check size. Nothing goes online before that tap, so no server learns where you are going while you are still choosing. The button then reads Download 35 MB. Once Innsbruck-Land is on the phone, tapping Innsbruck-Stadt says Covered by your pack Innsbruck-Land instead of offering it again, and its button says Installed.
The terrain is a separate download. In Map packs, each region has a Terrain row under its map, Heights to the ground. Its button first says Tap to see the size, then shows the size, and the next tap downloads it. When it is in, walker makes the hillshading and contour lines on the phone, and they show in the Topo layer.
You can start the downloads for the whole trip at once and leave the phone on Wi-Fi to finish them. The map and the terrain come from different servers and run side by side. A second district waits for the first and says Waits for the download using the same server. until it starts by itself. Each download is listed afterwards under Settings → Privacy & storage → Network log, with the server, the region and the bytes, so you can check afterwards what went online and how much data it took.
Before you leave
A trip to Tyrol needs the district you sleep in and the district of each valley you drive to. Look at the terrain's size first, because it decides whether one evening on Wi-Fi is enough. Then the flight-mode test tells you whether the map is really on the phone, while there is still time to fetch what is missing.
