Only 203 of 1,807 campgrounds in Taiwan are compliant: building a lookup from the official list, and the sentence of mine it forced me to correct
The fourth tool is a campground legality check. Its data is the simplest of the lot — one CSV, 1,807 rows — and its problems were the least like programming problems: what may be written, what may not, and what the government has actually published.
2026-08-21 作者 William Hsu
The starting point: the official search can only say "yes"
Taiwan's Tourism Administration publishes a nationwide campground dataset on the open data platform (dataset 132066), updated quarterly. The version I pulled (source file dated 2026-04-28) has 1,807 operating campgrounds, with one column marking "compliant / in breach of regulations" and another naming the regulation breached.
- Operating 1,807
- Compliant 203, or 11.2%
- In breach 1,604, or 88.8%
- Three years earlier the May 2023 official figures were 1,843 sites with 1,608 in breach — the ratio has not moved
The Tourism Administration's own search at camp.tad.gov.tw lists only the compliant ones in its menus, its search and its map. When the site you were going to does not come up there, you cannot tell whether it is in breach, spelled differently, or simply never surveyed. That is the reason for this tool: put both lists in one search box, so that "not found" becomes a meaningful answer.
Flagging the data's own problems instead of hiding them
The "regulation breached" column is typed in by hand by each local government, in 62 different spellings: the same act written several ways, several acts in one cell, full-width and half-width characters mixed, and conditional sentences like "no breach if the camping area involves no construction". I did not guess. I did two things:
- Group the regulations into ten categories by keyword (Regional Plan Act, land-use control, Agricultural Development Act, unregistered, Urban Planning Act, Building Act, Forestry Act, Soil and Water Conservation Act, National Park Act, pending survey), always showing the original text as well. That gives 787 sites under the Regional Plan Act, 435 under land-use control and 229 under the Agricultural Development Act — over 70% between them, all variations of "this land cannot be used this way".
- Mark the data's contradictions rather than picking a side: 58 sites are marked in breach with no regulation named, and the page says so; 24 are marked compliant yet have a regulation filled in, shown as compliant with a note that the record contradicts itself; 8 conditional sentences and 8 pending survey each get their own note.
Another 246 have no address and 68 no coordinates. The official points themselves are accurate: comparing 81 sites against the campground centres in OpenStreetMap gives a median difference of 58 metres. But the data has only a point — no extent, no area, no parcel number. So the map draws points and not circles: drawing a fixed-radius circle without area data would be inventing a number.
Three kinds of answer
A search returns one of three things: compliant, in breach (with the original wording of the regulation), or not in this dataset at all. The third is deliberately given its own block, because it is the one most often overlooked and the only thing that can answer "why can't I find it on the official site".
The search itself is forgiving: the two ways of writing "Tai" in Taiwan are interchangeable, suffixes like "camping area" and "farm" are stripped before matching, typos fall back to similarity matching, and township names and addresses are searchable too. Misspelling one farm's name still finds it, and "Smangus" returns two sites.
A web article made me correct a sentence of my own
On launch day a user sent me a summary article from a property website, saying it read well and could be useful, but that the sources needed checking. I went through it against the primary sources:
- It said the new wastewater rules took effect on 1 July 2024. The Ministry of Environment announced the amendment on 16 January 2024, and because operators needed a transition period it actually took effect on 1 March 2025.
- It said "over a hundred sites sit in environmentally sensitive areas". That was a 2022 survey; the Tourism Administration's current notice page (updated on the 1st and 16th of each month) says 20.
- It cited "Article 15" of the Regional Plan Act for the NT$60,000–300,000 fine. The prohibition is Article 15; the penalty is Article 21.
- It said the tourism authority's portal has a lookup for both legal and illegal campgrounds. That one is correct — and it showed me that I had got something wrong myself.
The main official search does list only compliant sites, but a page of "campgrounds in breach of regulations" does exist (camp.tad.gov.tw/CMZ/illegal.jsp, 1,546 entries, live data). It is simply not linked from the main menu: you have to reach it through the administrative information site's campground survey platform, and it has only four columns — name, county, township, regulation — with no address and no map. My page had said the government "only lists the compliant ones, and the word 'breach' appears nowhere on the site". That was wrong, and I rewrote it the same day to say that the two lists are searched separately there while this site puts them in one box.
I also found that the open data CSV and the Tourism Administration's live site disagree: the CSV says 203 compliant and 1,604 in breach, the live site says 220 and 1,546. The difference is timing, since the CSV is only republished quarterly. That went onto the data page too: to check one site's status right now, the authority's own website is authoritative.
In the end I did not link that article, because three of its points do not match the source text. But it deserves thanks: it is why the "regulations and penalties" page exists. That page lays out the key points of the 2025 campground management guidelines (permitted land uses, the 10% / 660 m² ceiling on agricultural and forestry land under one hectare, registration documents, disclosure duties, minimum insurance) and the penalties under the four main acts, each with a link to the Ministry of Justice's national law database. Anything I could not check against the original text is not there.
Deliberately not done
- No "illegal" or "unscrupulous" — only the government's own phrase, "in breach of regulations".
- No jump from "breaches the Regional Plan Act" to "unsafe". Land-use problems and safety are different things.
- No phone numbers, websites or booking links. This is not a campground directory and it sends traffic to nobody.
- No 1,807 individual pages. A page carrying one line of status helps nobody.
A scheduled job fetches the CSV every night and does nothing if the source file version is unchanged; when it does change, it checks the row count, the number of counties, and that compliant plus in-breach equals the total before publishing. The tool is at lazetool.com/camp and the law page is at regulations and penalties (both in Chinese).