Google adds Street View imagery for Hungary and Lesotho, breezing past its goal of 50 countries

Google has added Street View imagery for Hungary and Lesotho today, alongside new coverage for Poland, Romania and other locations dotted around the world.

The service, which adds 360 degree high-resolution photographs to Google Maps, now covers 50 countries in total. It’s a far cry from the other types of coverage offered by Google Maps, but given the time and resources it takes to drive Street View vehicles through each area, it’s still pretty impressive.

The introduction of Street View imagery for Hungary will allow users to explore numerous cities including Budapest and Debrecen, as well as tourist attractions and landmark sites such as the Hungarian Parliament building and Chain Bridge.

Lesotho, meanwhile, is an enclave surrounded by South Africa. It’s a beautiful, rural place and is known as the only independent state to sit entirely at 1,000m or more above sea level.

Google is also revamping its imagery for a number of countries already covered by Street View: France, Italy, Poland, Romania, Russia, Singapore and Thailand. The new shots include a number of “special collections” that use Google’s Street View Trike – a rather novel bicycle-based camera system – to hit spots such as the Pena National Palace in Portugal, the Sha Tin Che Kung Temple in Hong Kong and Kilkenny Castle in Ireland.

Google is also planning to bring Street View to Bhutan, a little-known country near India. Photographs will be taken “over the next few years,” however, so don’t expect to see the results for a little while yet.

Street View is useful for planning routes and seeing exactly where you should be heading, but it’s also become a rather novel educational tool. Images were recently added for Namie-machi, a small city in the Fukushima Prefecture that is now a ghost town following one of the world’s worst nuclear disasters.

It joins a number of shots revealing some of the most famous mountains on earth, including Mount Everest and Kilimanjaro.

Even if you’re not headed to any of these places – how many of us are radiation specialists or Sir Edmund Hillary, after all – Street View remains a fascinating tool to explore.

Image Credit: ATTILA KISBENEDEK/AFP/GettyImages