Draw rects in Tilemap for off screen tiles?

I have a tile map that is 12800, 10240 in size with 32x32 tile size.

This tile map shows over 15,000 draw rects in the debugger even though the view port is only 800 x 480.

Are all tiles drawn even though they are way off screen?

They are not drawn, as they are off screen, but as they are on the layout they need to be in memory and included in the game logic...

Quite normal and totally necessary, for instance if an event said move player to tile at 12800, 10240 it needs to be there when you arrive...

If that is true why would there be > 15,000 draw rects in a 800x480 space?

Just to be clear most of the tile map is empty. It contains tiles that are a road or path. This sits on top of another tile map that contains the ground tiles.