Nowadays applications require efficient and fast techniques due to the growing volume of data and its increasing complexity. Recent studies promote the use of Access Methods (AMs) with Self-Organizing Maps (SOMs) for a faster similarity information retrieval. This paper proposes a new constructive SOM based on density, which is also useful for clustering. Our algorithm creates new units based on density of data, producing a better representation of the data space with a less computational cost for a comparable accuracy. It also uses AMs to reduce considerably the Number of Distance Calculations during the training process, outperforming existing constructive SOMs by as much as 89%. ©2007 IEEE.