Map of Vegetarian & Vegan-friendly European Countries

by Brian O'Sullivan
November 24, 2020
Nutrition

Having being stuck in lockdown for much of 2020, we couldn’t help daydream about traveling again. With that in mind, we wanted to see which European countries are best for meat-free diets.

We’re also going to take a look at growth rates of meat-free diets across the continent over the last 4 years. To rank our countries we’ve looked at:

  1. The number of vegan or vegetarian restaurants (source: happycow)

  2. How many vegan or vegetarian restaurants there are per head of population (population source: wikipedia)

Using those figures we calculated the number of veggie restaurants per million people. The higher that number, the higher that country's 'veggie-friendliness'.

The top 5 is pretty surprising!

I personally would not have guessed the top 5.

At 1 we have Iceland which sort of makes sense. Iceland has a small urban and relatively wealthy population. Luxembourg at 5 is similar, small and relatively wealthy. These countries only need a few veggie restaurants to push them up the table.

Portugal at 2 is definitely a surprise to me. When I think of Portuguese food I think of seafood and Chicken Piri-Piri. But there are hundreds of vegan or vegetarian restaurants in Portugal, who knew?

The Czech Republic at 3 is another surprise. As we move east along the European map we see fewer veggie-friendly countries. The Czech Republic bucks this trend.

Interestingly, it’s neighbour (and former Country-mate) Slovakia also takes a top spot. We asked some Czech friends, but they didn't have an explanation for this trend.

We wondered if most of the restaurants in the Czech Republic were vegetarian and not vegan but this isn’t the case either. 40% of its restaurants are vegan which is similar to other countries such as the UK.

The UK, at 4, is less of a surprise. The vegan society was founded in the UK way back in the ’40s and London is often touted as a particularly vegan-friendly city.

Check out the map below:

vegan vegetarian european map

In 4 years European countries have increased their veggie-friendliness by more than 50%

As I was researching this piece I discovered that a blogger called Jakub had created the same map I had almost exactly 4 years ago.

As I compared my updated map with Jakubs I came to an interesting realization. In just 4 years the number of vegan and vegetarian restaurants has dramatically increased.

In 3 countries, (France, Greece, and Bosnia), the growth rate is more than 200%. It’s over 100% in a further 9. In all, 75% of countries have seen a growth rate of more than 50%.

See the full table below:

Country Population No. of veggie restaurants No. of veggie restaurants per million Rank Growth rate vs 2016
Iceland 342,303 13 38.0 1 53%
Portugal 10,184,326 246 24.2 2 154%
Czech Republic 10,722,241 232 21.6 3 58%
United Kingdom 68,077,834 1447 21.3 4 88%
Luxembourg 632,174 12 19.0 5 73%
Netherlands 17,149,867 306 17.8 6 100%
Austria 9,045,069 160 17.7 7 28%
Switzerland 8,684,273 150 17.3 8 82%
Sweden 10,127,723 174 17.2 9 55%
Estonia 1,329,477 21 15.8 10 90%
Slovakia 5,462,617 84 15.4 11 114%
Finland 5,545,596 79 14.2 12 47%
Belgium 11,619,816 152 13.1 13 126%
Slovenia 2,079,798 27 13.0 14 34%
Ireland 4,973,244 63 12.7 15 67%
Lithuania 2,702,373 34 12.6 16 9%
Spain 46,798,331 584 12.5 17 84%
Germany 84,069,840 1015 12.1 18 68%
Latvia 1,876,751 22 11.7 19 102%
Malta 514,564 6 11.7 20 -1%
Denmark 5,799,640 65 11.2 21 84%
Poland 37,840,465 354 9.4 22 77%
Cyprus 1,192,875 11 9.2 23 110%
France 65,325,133 542 8.3 24 207%
Italy 60,442,138 499 8.3 25 29%
Hungary 9,652,821 78 8.1 26 50%
Greece 10,405,527 75 7.2 27 228%
Croatia 4,094,038 29 7.1 28 31%
Norway 5,436,637 38 7.0 29 27%
Montenegro 628,236 3 4.8 30 49%
Bulgaria 6,928,665 29 4.2 31 82%
North Macedonia 2,084,162 8 3.8 32 32%
Romania 19,168,101 53 2.8 34 73%
Serbia 8,729,686 22 2.5 35 129%
Kosovo 1,798,506 3 1.7 36 52%
Ukraine 43,642,532 58 1.3 38 121%
Bosnia and Herzegovina 3,269,170 4 1.2 39 308%
Belarus 9,452,123 11 1.2 40 191%
Moldova 4,031,141 3 0.7 41 -7%
Albania 2,878,367 1 0.3 42 -13%

Veggie restaurants: Vegan and vegetarian restaurants combined