Contact with nature is valuable for the health, wellbeing and development of children. Meanwhile, the urban environment and the contemporary urban lifestyle limit the opportunity for contact with nature. Given that children aged three to six years spend a significant amount of time in preschool, we aimed to: 1) investigate children’s opportunities to contact with nature during their time in preschool, including the availability of these schools’ own outdoor spaces and neighbouring green spaces for visiting; 2) recognise preschools’ practices in using available green spaces to enable children to have contact with nature; 3) identify the impact on the outdoor activities provided by preschools of factors such as the COVID-19 pandemic and preschool managers’ awareness of the importance of children’s contact with nature. We undertook GIS spatial analyses, an online survey, a telephone interview and a statistical analysis. We found that preschools enjoy various opportunities to use external green spaces due to their location at the background of the urban tissue and green infrastructure. However, regardless of the availability of neighbouring green spaces, as many as 45.6 % of 103 preschools declared visiting external green spaces at least once a week. Furthermore, as many as 97.7 % of 88 preschools declared that their children enjoyed their outdoor spaces at least once a day, spending a daily average of 103 min outdoors. We observed differences between the practices of public and non-public preschools in this regard. The COVID-19 pandemic did not change the frequency of use of most of the institutions’ own outdoor spaces, but it did significantly reduce visits to external green spaces. Our results indicate that there is considerable awareness of the importance of contact with nature for children’s development, providing promising conditions for future improvements towards more nature-oriented solutions. The results provide a baseline for implementing and monitoring improvements regarding human nature relations.
