Search Locations

Endpoint

GET /locations/search

A location is an overnight stop — a marina, harbour, or anchorage where you can berth or drop anchor and spend the night aboard your boat. (Towns and regions aren't locations; they only appear as aggregated groupings.)

Fast typeahead search for locations (marinas, anchorages, bays). Uses normalized matching that handles special characters -- for example, searching "dalbora" matches "d'Albora Marina".

Returns a lightweight response suitable for autocomplete UIs.

Authentication

Send X-API-Key: YOUR_API_KEY on every call from outside charter.boats — without it Cloudflare bot protection answers with an HTML 403 page, not JSON. Call it from your server: this route sends no CORS headers (only the exact GET /api/locations index does). See Authentication.

Query Parameters

Parameter	Type	Required	Description
`q`	string	Yes	Search query (minimum 2 characters)
`limit`	number	No	Max results (default: 10, max: 20)

Example Request

curl "https://charter.boats/api/locations/search?q=lefkas&limit=5" \
  -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_API_KEY"

Example Response

[
  {
    "id": 11335,
    "osm_id": 119160915,
    "name": "Lefkas Main Port",
    "lat": 38.8302965,
    "lon": 20.7114541,
    "city": "Municipal Unit of Lefkada",
    "state": "Ionian Islands",
    "country": "Greece",
    "harbour_category": "marina"
  },
  {
    "id": 21214,
    "osm_id": -61040274,
    "name": "Lefkas, Lygia Marina",
    "lat": 38.789125,
    "lon": 20.722885,
    "city": "Municipal Unit of Lefkada",
    "state": "Ionian Islands",
    "country": "Greece",
    "harbour_category": "marina"
  },
  {
    "id": 11336,
    "osm_id": 119160925,
    "name": "D-Marin Lefkas",
    "lat": 38.8289054,
    "lon": 20.7113582,
    "city": "Municipal Unit of Lefkada",
    "state": "Ionian Islands",
    "country": "Greece",
    "harbour_category": "marina"
  }
]

Response Fields

Field	Type	Description
`id`	number	Location ID
`osm_id`	number\|null	OpenStreetMap node ID
`name`	string	Location name
`lat`	number	Latitude
`lon`	number	Longitude
`city`	string\|null	City name
`state`	string\|null	State or region
`country`	string\|null	Country name
`harbour_category`	string\|null	Type of harbour (e.g. `marina`, `harbour`, `anchorage`)

Notes

Returns an empty array if q is missing or shorter than 2 characters.
Matching ignores case, accents and punctuation. A location matches when its name contains the query, when its city/region/country text contains it, or — for a multi-word query — when every word appears somewhere in the name, city, region or country, in any order ("marina frapa rogoznica").
Results are ordered: names that start with the query first, then names that contain it, then city/region/country text matches, then all-words matches; ties are alphabetical by name. There is no popularity or boat-count ranking here — use List Locations for that.
Only published locations are searched, and places without a name are never returned (an unnamed anchorage is not matched through its town's name).

Search Locations

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