The islands, old towns and sanctuaries people actually search for, written so you can follow them on foot. Which streets, the stop you get off at, what is shut on Mondays, who feeds them, and what they would rather you did not do.
Every guide, on one map. Tap a pin to open it.
Jwslubbock, CC BY-SA 4.0🇹🇷 Neighbourhood · Istanbul, TürkiyeCihangirIstanbul has roughly 125,000 street cats. This is the neighbourhood that looks after them best, and it is ten minutes downhill from Taksim.
暇・カキコ, CC BY-SA 4.0🇯🇵 Island · Ishinomaki, Miyagi, JapanTashirojimaThe cat island. About a hundred cats, about fifty people, one rule that has held since the beginning, and a ferry that takes an hour from a town most visitors have never heard of.
Guilhem Vellut from Annecy, France, CC BY 2.0🇯🇵 Neighbourhood · Tokyo, JapanYanakaTokyo’s "cat town": a low, old neighbourhood that survived the bombing, five minutes from a Yamanote line station, where the cats live in the cemetery and the shops sell nothing but cats.
Wknight94, CC BY-SA 3.0🇮🇹 Sanctuary · Rome, ItalyTorre ArgentinaA colony of about 130 cats living in the sunken ruins where Julius Caesar was killed, fed by volunteers, open to visitors six days a week, and closed on Mondays.
Kadı, CC BY 4.0🇹🇷 Neighbourhood · Istanbul, TürkiyeKadıköy and ModaThe Asian side of Istanbul, twenty minutes by ferry from the old city: a market, a seafront, more cats per park bench than anywhere in Europe, and a bronze statue of the one who went viral.
Alexkom000, CC BY 4.0🇲🇪 Neighbourhood · Kotor, MontenegroKotor Old TownA walled medieval port at the end of a fjord, where the cats arrived on ships, stayed for the rats, and ended up on the souvenirs, the flag of a museum, and every step of the fortress stairs.
4300streetcar, CC BY 4.0🇹🇼 Village · New Taipei, TaiwanHoutong Cat VillageA dead coal-mining village an hour from Taipei that a cat lover and a camera brought back to life. Cats on the station roof, a bridge built for them, and a set of rules on a yellow sign.
Cullen328, CC BY-SA 3.0🇺🇸 Landmark · Key West, Florida, United StatesThe Hemingway HouseAbout sixty cats, roughly half of them with six toes, living in the house where Hemingway wrote most of his best work. Open every day of the year, cash at the window, and the cats were here first.
Wee Hong, CC BY-SA 4.0🇲🇾 City · Kuching, Sarawak, MalaysiaKuchingA river city on Borneo whose name sounds exactly like the Malay for cat, and which decided, some time in the 1990s, to take that as instructions. Statues, a museum, and the real ones down by the water.
Rudolph.A.furtado, CC0🇭🇷 Neighbourhood · Dubrovnik, CroatiaDubrovnik Old TownA walled city on the Adriatic that has kept cats since the fourteenth century and calls them its noble cats. Off the main street, into the side lanes, where they have always been.
Buiobuione, CC BY-SA 4.0🇲🇦 Neighbourhood · Chefchaouen, MoroccoChefchaouenThe blue town in the Rif mountains. Every photograph you have ever seen of it has a cat in it, and this is why, and where, and what time of day.
Niwrat, CC0🇯🇵 Landmark · Tokyo, JapanGotokuji TempleThe temple where the beckoning cat comes from, in a quiet corner of Setagaya, with more than a thousand of them lined up on shelves. Free, open from six in the morning, and almost no actual cats.
水だらけのプール, CC0🇯🇵 Island · Shingū, Fukuoka, JapanAinoshimaFukuoka’s cat island: twenty minutes on a ferry from a small port outside the city, a couple of hundred cats, fifth-century stone tombs, and an afternoon that costs less than a coffee.
willow wilcox fox, CC BY-SA 2.0🇹🇷 Landmark · Istanbul, TürkiyeSultanahmetThe old city: Hagia Sophia, the Blue Mosque, and the cats who live in both. One of them was famous enough to be petted by a president and mourned by a country.
Kokiniatsi27, CC BY-SA 4.0🇬🇷 Island · Ermoupoli, GreeceSyrosThe Cycladic island with three thousand street cats and the sanctuary that ended up on Netflix. Two hours from Piraeus, a marble-stepped capital, and a hillside full of cats with a view.
George E. Koronaios, CC BY-SA 4.0🇬🇷 Neighbourhood · Athens, GreecePlaka and AnafiotikaThe old quarter under the Acropolis: cats on 2,500-year-old marble, cats in the whitewashed lanes of a village that should not be in the middle of a capital, and the sixty volunteers who keep them fed.
ノボホショコロトソ, CC BY 4.0🇯🇵 Neighbourhood · Onomichi, Hiroshima, JapanOnomichiA hillside port town on the Inland Sea with a lane officially called Cat Alley, a hundred and eight painted stone cats hidden along it, and real ones on the temple steps above.
Maarten Heerlien from Voorschoten, The Netherlands, CC BY 2.0🇯🇵 Island · Fujisawa, Kanagawa, JapanEnoshimaThe cat island you can do from Tokyo before lunch: a small rock off the Shōnan coast with a shrine, a cave, a view of Fuji on a clear day, and a handful of well-fed cats in the shrine precincts and the alleys.
Eticangaaa, CC BY-SA 4.0🇹🇷 Landmark · Selçuk, İzmir, TürkiyeEphesusA Roman city on the Aegean with a two-storey library, a theatre for 25,000, and a couple of hundred cats who sleep on the marble and are fed by the guards. One of them has an Instagram account.
Hamdigumus, CC0🇹🇷 Island · Istanbul, TürkiyeBüyükadaThe biggest of the Princes’ Islands, an hour and a half by ferry from the city, with no cars, wooden mansions, pine woods, a monastery on the hill and cats that have never learned to cross a road.
Adam Harangozó, CC BY-SA 4.0🇲🇦 Neighbourhood · Essaouira, MoroccoEssaouiraA walled Atlantic port where the fishermen feed the cats at the boats, the cats sleep on the cannons of the sea wall, and a British charity has spent twenty years making sure there are not more of them than the town can feed.
Jon Gudorf Photography, CC BY-SA 2.0🇬🇷 Neighbourhood · Rhodes, GreeceRhodes Old TownA medieval walled city built by crusader knights, with around seventy cats living around the castle, fed by a local who collects for them in summer so they survive the winter.
Julian Lupyan, CC0🇬🇷 Neighbourhood · Mykonos, GreeceMykonos Old TownThe whitewashed maze of Chora, where the cats sit in the blue doorways, supervise the fish market and claim the cafe terraces, and a charity founded in 2005 keeps feeding stations going through the winter when the island empties.
Hyppolyte de Saint-Rambert, CC BY 4.0🇯🇵 Neighbourhood · Tokoname, Aichi, JapanTokonameThe pottery town that makes most of Japan’s lucky cats, two train stops from Nagoya’s airport, with a street of ceramic cats set into a wall and a giant one, Tokonyan, looking over the top of it.
GinoOnassis, CC0🇬🇷 Neighbourhood · Corfu, GreeceCorfu Old TownA Venetian town on an Ionian island, tall houses on narrow lanes with washing strung between them, and cats on the steps of all of it. Thousands across the island, and a sanctuary twenty minutes out that takes the ones the town cannot.
Blackcat, CC BY-SA 3.0🇮🇹 Landmark · Rome, ItalyThe Non-Catholic CemeteryKeats and Shelley, a Roman pyramid, four thousand graves under cypresses, and a colony of cats with its own volunteers. Free, quiet, and the most beautiful place to sit down in Rome.
Txllxt TxllxT, CC BY-SA 4.0🇲🇹 City · Valletta, MaltaValletta and SliemaAn island with an estimated 350,000 stray cats, a thousand registered feeders, a cat village in a public garden, and a fifty-euro fine for feeding without a licence. Where to find them, and how to do it legally.
Oxyman, CC BY 2.5🇳🇱 Sanctuary · Amsterdam, NetherlandsDe PoezenbootA cat sanctuary on a barge on the Singel canal, since 1966, open three afternoons a week, free, with up to fifty cats aboard and an adoption desk. The only floating cat shelter in the world, and a ten-minute walk from Centraal.
Jeremy Keith from Brighton & Hove, United Kingdom, CC BY 2.0🇮🇱 City · Tel Aviv, IsraelTel Aviv and JaffaA country with an estimated two million street cats and a law that says how to feed them, and the old port town at the south end of the city where the fishermen have been doing it for longer than the law.
Jose Luis1972, CC BY-SA 4.0🇦🇷 Landmark · Buenos Aires, ArgentinaRecoleta CemeteryThe grandest cemetery in South America, with Evita in it, once had a colony of more than sixty cats that stole the show. Six are left, fed at five every morning by the florist outside the gate. This page tells you that before you go.
Sam Howzit, CC BY 2.0🇺🇸 Landmark · Anaheim, California, United StatesDisneylandAround two hundred cats live inside Disneyland, kept on purpose, fed at stations hidden in the shrubbery, and almost never seen. Where they are, when you might glimpse one, and why the park will not talk about it.
Sasha India, CC BY 2.0🇬🇪 Neighbourhood · Tbilisi, GeorgiaTbilisi Old TownCarved wooden balconies, sulphur baths, a fortress on the ridge, and cats on every stair of a city that has taken to painting them on the electricity boxes. Plus a market that pays for their neutering.
Alexey Komarov, CC BY-SA 4.0🇲🇾 Neighbourhood · Penang, MalaysiaGeorge TownA shophouse city with the best street art in Southeast Asia, a project that painted a hundred and one lost kittens onto its walls to get real ones adopted, and the real ones asleep in the doorways underneath.
Adam Jones, CC BY-SA 2.0🇹🇭 Landmark · Bangkok, ThailandTemple catsBangkok’s temples take in the cats nobody else will, and the monks feed them on almost nothing. Wat Pho, Wat Arun, and the quieter ones where the cats outnumber the visitors.
Seth Werkheiser, CC BY-SA 2.0🇺🇸 City · New York, United StatesBodega catsRoughly four thousand cats live in New York’s corner shops, technically against the health code, universally loved, and the subject of a bill to make them legal. Where they are, and how to visit one without being weird about it.
Yusuf Bayezit, CC BY-SA 4.0🇹🇷 City · Van, TürkiyeVanThe actual Van cats, white with one blue eye and one amber, at the university research centre by the lake they are named for, in the far east of Türkiye. Every white cat in Istanbul is called one of these. These are the real ones.
Alexey Komarov, CC BY-SA 4.0🇫🇷 Landmark · Paris, FranceMontmartre CemeteryThe cats of the cemetery under the bridge in Montmartre, saved from the city in 1977 by the locals who fed them, and still fed by the same association fifty years on. Degas, Truffaut and Dalida are the neighbours.
Eleanor Abernathy, CC BY-SA 3.0🇭🇷 Neighbourhood · Split, CroatiaSplitA Roman emperor’s retirement palace that a whole town moved into, with a fish market the cats have staffed since the eighteen-nineties and a pine hill behind it where they go to be left alone.
tylerkaraszewski, CC BY 2.0🇬🇷 Island · Hydra, GreeceHydraAn island with no cars, where the fish comes off the boat onto the quay and the cats are waiting for it. Mules for luggage, Leonard Cohen’s old house up the hill, and a colony on every set of steps.
Jennifer Boyer from Fredrick, Maryland, USA, CC BY 2.0🇧🇦 Neighbourhood · Sarajevo, Bosnia and HerzegovinaBaščaršijaThe Ottoman bazaar at the heart of Sarajevo, coppersmiths and coffee and a wooden fountain covered in pigeons, with cats in the mosque courtyards and on the steps of the coppersmiths’ lane, fed by everyone who works there.
Joe Dorward, CC BY-SA 4.0🇬🇮 City · Gibraltar, GibraltarGibraltarEveryone comes for the monkeys. The cats are on the lanes of the Upper Town, in the botanic gardens and along the beach at Catalan Bay, looked after by a volunteer group with feeding stations across the Rock.
Edgars Košovojs, CC BY-SA 4.0🇱🇻 Landmark · Riga, LatviaThe Cat HouseTwo copper cats on the turrets of a 1909 townhouse in old Riga, put there, the story goes, with their backsides pointed at the guild that would not let their owner in. The most photographed cats in the Baltics, and they have never moved. Except once, by court order.
暇・カキコ, CC BY-SA 4.0🇯🇵 Island · Ozu, Ehime, JapanAoshimaThe cat island that went round the world in 2015: a fishing village with a handful of elderly residents, no shops, two ferries a day, and more cats than people by a factor of ten. Still true, but the story is in its last chapter, and you should know that before you go.
Mehman, CC BY-SA 4.0🇹🇷 Neighbourhood · Istanbul, TürkiyeBalat and FenerThe old Greek and Jewish quarters on the Golden Horn, all coloured houses, steep steps and washing lines, with a cat on every one of the steps. The neighbourhood the cat film was made in, and still the best place in the city to walk with them.
Stabbur's Master, CC BY-SA 2.0🇵🇷 Neighbourhood · San Juan, Puerto RicoOld San JuanBlue cobbles, pastel houses, two Spanish forts, and a colony of cats along the sea wall that has been fed by volunteers for twenty years and fought over by the federal government for the last two. Go while it is still there.
Noelle Gillies, CC BY-SA 2.0🇨🇺 Neighbourhood · Havana, CubaOld HavanaFour colonial plazas, arcades, crumbling mansions and a book market, with cats in the shade of all of them, fed by people who have less than almost anyone else who feeds cats on this site.
cabezadeturco, CC BY-SA 2.0🇲🇦 Neighbourhood · Marrakech, MoroccoThe Marrakech MedinaThe souks, the square and the riads of a city that treats cats as a religious courtesy: on the carpets, on the leather, under the food stalls of Jemaa el-Fna, and in the gardens where the tourists go to breathe.
Mstyslav Chernov, CC BY-SA 3.0🇬🇷 Island · Santorini, GreeceOia and FiraThe caldera villages everyone photographs, and the cats on the walls in front of the view. A welfare association that has neutered them since 1992, tavernas that feed them, and a sunset crowd that mostly does not notice.
bryangeek, CC BY-SA 2.0🇮🇹 Landmark · Rome, ItalyThe Colosseum and the ForumRome made its street cats official heritage in 2001. They live in the Forum, the Colosseum, the ruins where Caesar was stabbed, and a Protestant cemetery under a pyramid, fed by the gattare who have always fed them.
Clemens Vasters, CC BY 2.0🇮🇹 City · Venice, ItalyVeniceVenice was a city of cats for a thousand years, and then, in the nineties, most of them went. Where the few that are left live, why the rest are gone, and the shelter on the Lido where the story continues.
Rudolph.A.furtado, Public domain🇮🇱 Neighbourhood · Jerusalem, IsraelThe Old CityFour quarters, eight gates, three religions, and a street cat population that the city itself counts in the hundreds of thousands. They are on every step of the souk and every wall of the Via Dolorosa, fed by everyone who disagrees about everything else.
Ahmed Hamed Ahmed, CC BY-SA 4.0🇪🇬 Neighbourhood · Cairo, EgyptIslamic CairoThe medieval city of mosques, gates and bazaars, where the cats sleep on the tombs of Mamluk sultans and the descendants of the animals Egypt once worshipped work the Khan el-Khalili for kebab scraps.
Jeanne Menj, CC BY 2.0🇫🇷 Landmark · Paris, FrancePère LachaiseThe biggest cemetery in Paris, a hillside of tombs and cobbled avenues where Chopin, Wilde and Piaf are buried, and a colony of cats that has lived among them for as long as anyone has been visiting.
ewwl, CC BY-SA 3.0🇷🇺 Landmark · St Petersburg, RussiaThe Hermitage CatsFifty or so cats have lived in the basements of the Winter Palace since an empress ordered them from Kazan in 1745 to deal with the mice. They have their own staff, their own press officer and their own day. You can see them, with planning.
Blowing Puffer Fish, CC BY 2.0🇹🇭 Landmark · Chiang Mai, ThailandOld City templesThree hundred temples inside and around a square moat, and the monks feed the cats at all of them. The northern, slower, kinder version of the Bangkok temple cats, with a ruined chedi in the middle of it.
ironypoisoning, CC BY-SA 2.0🇹🇭 Sanctuary · Koh Lanta, ThailandLanta Animal WelfareA rescue centre on a beach island in the Andaman Sea that has sterilised most of the island’s cats and dogs, gives free tours every day, and lets you take a cat home to Europe if you are flying that way anyway.
Sasha India, CC BY 2.0🇵🇪 Landmark · Lima, PeruParque KennedyThe main square of Miraflores has a colony of cats living in its flower beds, fed and neutered by volunteers, sat on by half the district, and famous enough that people fly in and go straight there from the airport.
Shepard4711, CC BY-SA 2.0🇬🇷 Neighbourhood · Chania, GreeceChania Old HarbourA Venetian harbour, an Ottoman mosque, a lighthouse at the end of the mole, and cats under every taverna table along the water. Plus a monastery in the hills where the monks keep a colony among the olives.
mamamusings, CC BY-SA 2.0🇬🇷 Landmark · Athens, GreeceThe Ancient AgoraThe two agoras under the Acropolis, Greek and Roman, are ruins with cats on the column drums, and the lanes of Plaka and Anafiotika above them are where the cats go home. Fed by the guards, the tavernas and a volunteer group that has neutered thousands.
Jamie J. Hagen, CC BY 2.0🇹🇷 Neighbourhood · Istanbul, TürkiyeGalata and KaraköyThe Genoese tower, the steep lanes down to the Golden Horn, the fish stalls of Karaköy and the cafés of Cihangir, the neighbourhood the cat film made famous. If Istanbul is the cat capital of the world, this is the district it governs from.
雷太, CC BY 2.0🇯🇵 City · Nagasaki, JapanNagasakiThe port that was Japan’s only window on the world for two centuries, and the city where most of the cats have a kink in the tail. The Dutch ships brought them, the hills kept them, and a local society counts them.
Prof. Mortel, CC BY 2.0🇹🇿 Neighbourhood · Zanzibar, TanzaniaStone TownCoral-stone lanes, carved doors, a night market on the seafront and a Swahili tradition of feeding cats that goes back to the Omani sultans. They are on every doorstep and under every night-market table.
Chrismartin76, CC BY-SA 2.0🇲🇦 Neighbourhood · Rabat, MoroccoThe Kasbah of the UdayasA blue and white walled village on the cliff where the river meets the Atlantic, in the capital nobody visits. Cats on the whitewashed walls, a man who feeds them at his door every morning, and a garden of orange trees where they sleep.
Zanatox, CC BY 2.0🇨🇱 City · Valparaíso, ChileValparaísoA port of forty-two hills, funiculars, painted houses and street art, where the cats sit on the newspaper stands, the stairways and the murals, and the locals call them porteños like themselves.
nromagna, CC BY 2.0🇲🇦 Neighbourhood · Fez, MoroccoFez el-BaliThe largest car-free urban area in the world, nine thousand lanes of medieval city, with the oldest university, the smelliest tanneries, and a cat at every butcher’s door waiting for the scraps that have been falling since the ninth century.
C+H, CC BY-SA 2.0🇮🇳 Neighbourhood · Kochi, IndiaFort KochiChinese fishing nets on the beach, a fish market where you buy the catch and a stall cooks it, Portuguese churches, Dutch houses and a spice-warehouse lane in Jew Town. The cats work the fish stalls, and have since the Portuguese.
Al Sanin, CC BY-SA 3.0🇪🇸 Neighbourhood · Barcelona, SpainEl RavalA giant bronze cat by Botero that wandered the city for sixteen years before settling on the Rambla del Raval, a volunteer cat garden behind the Boqueria, and the real colonies the city registers, ear-tips and feeds. Barcelona’s cats, on the wrong side of the Rambla.
jit bag, CC BY 2.0🇭🇰 City · Hong Kong, Hong KongShop catsThe dried-seafood shops, hardware stores, fruit stalls and estate agents of Hong Kong keep cats on the counter, on the rice sacks and in the window, and a book of photographs made them famous. Where the shop cats are, on both sides of the harbour.
Zde, CC BY-SA 4.0🇬🇷 Island · Naxos, GreeceNaxosThe biggest of the Cyclades, with a Venetian castle on the hill above the harbour, a marble doorway to nowhere on the islet, and cats on every step of the old town between them. Less famous than Santorini, better fed, and the cats are the same.
Monika Kostera (urbanlegend), CC BY-SA 2.0🇨🇾 Sanctuary · Akrotiri, CyprusSt Nicholas of the CatsA monastery on a salt-lake peninsula near Limassol where, the story goes, a Byzantine empress shipped in a thousand cats to kill the snakes. Sixteen centuries later the nuns are still feeding their descendants, and the cape is named after them.
Gemini st., CC BY 2.0🇯🇵 Island · Kaminoseki, Yamaguchi, JapanIwaishimaA stone-walled island village in the Seto Inland Sea that has spent forty years saying no to a nuclear plant across the water, and whose lanes are full of cats. Not a cat island by marketing, a cat island by neglect of everything except the cats.
wallygrom, CC BY-SA 2.0🇦🇷 Landmark · Buenos Aires, ArgentinaThe Botanical GardenFor decades the Jardín Botánico in Palermo was the most famous cat garden in South America, with hundreds of abandoned cats among the palms. Then the city and the volunteers found them homes. What is left, why, and where Buenos Aires keeps its cats now.
williamcho, CC BY-SA 2.0🇸🇬 Neighbourhood · Singapore, SingaporeKampong Glam and the community catsA city that counts, sterilises and registers its street cats block by block, calls them community cats, and put a bronze one on the river. Where to meet them anyway: the shophouse lanes around the Sultan Mosque, and the void decks of any housing estate.
muffinn, CC BY 2.0🇲🇹 Island · Sliema, MaltaMalta and GozoA seafront garden in Sliema that the locals turned into a cat village, a fishing harbour where the cats meet the boats, a walled capital with cats in the ditches, and the slower island across the strait. Malta feeds its cats in public and argues about how.
Luc Coekaerts from Tessenderlo, CC0 1.0🇹🇷 Village · Kaş, TürkiyeKaş and KalkanTwo harbour towns half an hour apart on the Lycian coast, with bougainvillea, Greek houses, a Lycian tomb in the middle of the shopping street, and cats in every shop, on every restaurant chair and painted up the side of at least one house.
frozenchipmunk, CC BY 2.0🇯🇵 Landmark · Kyoto, JapanNyan Nyan Ji and the cats of KyotoA hundred-year-old farmhouse in the hills north of Kyoto that a painter turned into a cat temple, with a cat abbot and a museum of cat art next door. Plus the real colonies: the cats among the torii at Fushimi Inari and along the canal of the Philosopher’s Path.
Every place
The places people search for when they want to find cats. The ones with a guide are linked. The rest are on their way.
🇲🇽The Centro HistóricoMexico City, MexicoThe cats of the National Palace, which the government feeds, and the streets around it.“mexico city cats”
Know somewhere we have missed? hello@chonkfinder.app. If the cats are the reason to go, it belongs here.
You will lose track of them by lunch.
Anywhere on this list, twenty cats in a morning is normal, and by the evening they have quietly collapsed into one ginger and one tabby. Photograph one with Chonk Finder and you get a card back with where and when you met it, so the trip is still there in a year.
Free, no sign-up, works offline. Please do not pick up anybody’s cat.
