While San Francisco’s gay mecca, Castro, still unsurprisingly holds the title of safest neighbourhood for LGBT+ travellers, it seems that Europe is no slouch, taking up the next three spots in the worldwide top five.

GeoSure, a smartphone app created specifically to measure how safe geographical locations are for wary travellers, revealed its top five safest queer neighbourhoods. As mentioned, Castro was still way ahead of the game, but not too far off in the runner up position was Berlin’s Schonenburg, the eclectic, buzzy neighbourhood with a large queer community.

In third position was Centrum in Amsterdam, which, surprisingly, encompasses the Red Light District as well as the Anne Frank Museum. Coming in fourth was Eixample in Barcelona, which describes itself as being the most comfortable and diverse places to live with a reputation for an amazing nightlife scene. Rounding out the top five was Tel Aviv’s Florentin neighbourhood in its city centre, known for its youthful population and its mixture of hip, artisan attractions in the daytime and its pumping nightlife after dark. 

GeoSure reached its conclusion by measuring country, city and neighbourhood crime statistics, economic and political data feeds, tourism and travel alerts, real time reports and mapping technologies.

While that may be overwhelming to take it, their checklist of focuses may clear things up a little. They have a list of seven critical safety categories, consisting of:

Overall Safety, Women’s Safety, LGBT+ Safety, Physical Harm, Theft, Health And Medical and Political Freedoms.

As the results were revealed, the GeoSure CEO, Michael Becker stated: “Three years ago, GeoSure was the first ever to develop a dedicated women’s travel safety measure scaled globally, and today we are pleased to unveil the first localised safety awareness solution specifically for travelling LGBTQ persons. Whether traveling for business, leisure or study abroad, our singular focus is providing the most rapid safety awareness, granular to the neighbourhood level, to help people have the smoothest trip experience possible.”

With so many amazing worldwide Pride events to choose from, perhaps knowing the safest neighbourhoods in advance will make choices easier for LGBT+ travellers.