Setting the zoom level for a MKMapView

I found myself a solution, which is very simple and does the trick. Use MKCoordinateRegionMakeWithDistance in order to set the distance in meters vertically and horizontally to get the desired zoom. And then of course when you update your location you'll get the right coordinates, or you can specify it directly in the CLLocationCoordinate2D at startup, if that's what you need to do:

CLLocationCoordinate2D noLocation;
MKCoordinateRegion viewRegion = MKCoordinateRegionMakeWithDistance(noLocation, 500, 500);
MKCoordinateRegion adjustedRegion = [self.mapView regionThatFits:viewRegion];          
[self.mapView setRegion:adjustedRegion animated:YES];
self.mapView.showsUserLocation = YES;

Swift:

let location = ...
let region = MKCoordinateRegion( center: location.coordinate, latitudinalMeters: CLLocationDistance(exactly: 5000)!, longitudinalMeters: CLLocationDistance(exactly: 5000)!)
mapView.setRegion(mapView.regionThatFits(region), animated: true)

Based on the fact that longitude lines are spaced apart equally at any point of the map, there is a very simple implementation to set the centerCoordinate and zoomLevel:

@interface MKMapView (ZoomLevel)

@property (assign, nonatomic) NSUInteger zoomLevel;

- (void)setCenterCoordinate:(CLLocationCoordinate2D)centerCoordinate
                  zoomLevel:(NSUInteger)zoomLevel
                   animated:(BOOL)animated;

@end


@implementation MKMapView (ZoomLevel)

- (void)setZoomLevel:(NSUInteger)zoomLevel {
    [self setCenterCoordinate:self.centerCoordinate zoomLevel:zoomLevel animated:NO];
}

- (NSUInteger)zoomLevel {
    return log2(360 * ((self.frame.size.width/256) / self.region.span.longitudeDelta)) + 1;
}

- (void)setCenterCoordinate:(CLLocationCoordinate2D)centerCoordinate
zoomLevel:(NSUInteger)zoomLevel animated:(BOOL)animated {
    MKCoordinateSpan span = MKCoordinateSpanMake(0, 360/pow(2, zoomLevel)*self.frame.size.width/256);
    [self setRegion:MKCoordinateRegionMake(centerCoordinate, span) animated:animated];
}

@end

It's not built in, but I've seen / used this code. This allows you to use this:

[mapView setCenterCoordinate:myCoord zoomLevel:13 animated:YES];

Note: This is not my code, I did not write it, so therefore can't take credit for it