MENA Places Scraper: restaurants, pharmacies, banks, hotels and more in Egypt, UAE, Saudi Arabia and the Middle East

Build a business and places directory for the Middle East and North Africa from OpenStreetMap, the open map that is edited by local mappers. Pick a city such as Dubai, Cairo, Riyadh, Jeddah, Doha or Amman, choose categories such as restaurants, pharmacies, banks, hotels, clinics, supermarkets or gyms, and get one row per place with English and Arabic names, address, phone, website, opening hours and exact coordinates.

It is a free-data alternative to a Google Maps scraper: no Google account, no browser, no proxy, and a licence that lets you reuse the data (ODbL, with attribution).

What you get

• 34 ready-made categories (restaurant, cafe, fast food, bakery, supermarket, mall, pharmacy, hospital, clinic, dentist, bank, ATM, hotel, school, university, gym, mosque, fuel station, car repair, car dealer, hairdresser, beauty salon, real estate agency, lawyer, travel agency, cinema, park, tourist attraction and more). Add any OpenStreetMap tag yourself with customTags, for example shop=bakery.
• 25 MENA cities built in (Cairo, Alexandria, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Sharjah, Al Ain, Ras Al Khaimah, Riyadh, Jeddah, Dammam, Mecca, Medina, Doha, Kuwait City, Manama, Muscat, Amman, Beirut, Casablanca, Rabat, Marrakech, Tunis, Algiers, Baghdad, Erbil), 13 whole countries, or your own bounding box.
• Arabic and English names in nameAr and nameEn when mapped.
• Coordinates for every place and a link to the OpenStreetMap object.
• Fast and cheap. One map query per city and category, no scraping of web pages.
• No personal data. Only businesses and public places. No e-mail addresses, no reviews and no user profiles.

Input

Field	Meaning	Example
cities	Built-in MENA cities	["Dubai", "Cairo"]
countries	Whole countries by ISO code (slower)	["EG"]
bbox	Own area south,west,north,east (max 4 square degrees)	"30.00,31.20,30.10,31.30"
categories	Business categories	["restaurant", "pharmacy"]
customTags	Extra OpenStreetMap tags, join conditions with +	["shop=bakery"]
onlyNamed	Skip unnamed map objects	true
maxPlacesPerQuery	Limit per city and category	50
maxPlaces	Limit for the whole run	200

If you choose nothing the Actor searches restaurants and pharmacies in Dubai, so the default run always returns data.

Example input:

{
  "cities": ["Cairo", "Riyadh"],
  "categories": ["pharmacy", "hospital", "clinic"],
  "maxPlacesPerQuery": 100,
  "maxPlaces": 500
}

Output

Example rows (real output, trimmed):

Name	Arabic name	Category	Area	Address	Phone	Lat, Lon
Maison Thomas	ميزون توماس	restaurant	Cairo	شارع 26 يوليو, Cairo	+201223692004	30.059169, 31.224175
Lucille's	لوسيلز	restaurant	Cairo	54 شارع 9, Cairo	+201092915000	29.954736, 31.262069
La Brioche	-	cafe	Abu Dhabi	-	+971 2 6813353	24.47052, 54.340129
Cafe Arabia	-	cafe	Abu Dhabi	Mohammed Bin Khalifa Street	+971 2 643 9699	24.455876, 54.379316

Full JSON item:

{
  "osmId": "node/366467852",
  "name": "Maison Thomas",
  "nameEn": "Maison Thomas",
  "nameAr": "ميزون توماس",
  "category": "restaurant",
  "osmTag": "amenity=restaurant",
  "cuisine": "italian",
  "address": "شارع 26 يوليو, Cairo",
  "street": "شارع 26 يوليو",
  "city": "Cairo",
  "area": "Cairo",
  "latitude": 30.059169,
  "longitude": 31.224175,
  "phone": "+201223692004",
  "website": "https://www.maisonthomas.net/",
  "openingHours": "24/7",
  "osmUrl": "https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/366467852",
  "license": "© OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL 1.0"
}

Use cases

• Local business lead lists and market maps for sales teams (business phone numbers and websites where mapped).
• Site selection and competitor mapping: how many pharmacies, banks or cafes are in a district.
• Location data for apps, delivery and logistics in the Gulf and Egypt.
• Research and journalism with open, reusable data.

Data quality, honestly

OpenStreetMap is built by volunteers. Coverage is very good for the main cities of the UAE, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, but phone numbers, websites and opening hours exist only for a part of the places. Smaller cities and some categories have fewer entries than Google Maps. Use it where open, reusable data is what you need.

Attribution and licence

Data is © OpenStreetMap contributors and available under the Open Database Licence (ODbL). Keep the license field or credit OpenStreetMap when you publish results. See openstreetmap.org/copyright.

Fair use of the public map servers

The Actor sends a few queries one after another to the public Overpass API servers run by the OpenStreetMap community, and waits when they are busy. If a server is overloaded, a query may fail after several retries; the PROBLEMS record in the key-value store lists failed queries. Use maxPlacesPerQuery and avoid very large countries with many categories in a single run.

Pricing

Pay per event: a small fee when a run starts plus a fee for every place returned. Set a maximum cost per run and the Actor stops at your limit. See the pricing panel on this page for the current rates.

Support

Missing a city or category? Use the Issues tab of this Actor.