portolan-pipeline
Point locations of populated places, cities and towns, at 1:50m scale from Natural Earth. Public domain reference points, republished as cloud-native GeoParquet alongside the original zipped Shapefile.
License, CC0-1.0. Providers, Natural Earth (producer, licensor), Portolan SDI (host). Original source, https://naciscdn.org/naturalearth/50m/cultural/ne_50m_populated_places.zip . Features, 1251. Cloud-native asset, natural-earth-populated-places.parquet (GeoParquet).
The data asset is GeoParquet 2.0 with a native geometry type and a covering bbox column for fast web-client pruning. Read it with a recent GeoPandas built on pyarrow 24 or newer.
Or query it in place with a recent DuckDB spatial.