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.
City and town points at 1:50m scale from
Natural Earth, version 5.1.2 from
May 2022. The 1,251 points cover every national and most first-level
capitals, major cities, and, in Natural Earth's own words, a sampling
of smaller towns in sparsely inhabited regions, favoring regional
significance over population census. LandScan-derived population
estimates cover about 90 percent of the places.
Agents, read AGENTS.md first, especially before joining
these points to country polygons.
What Counts as a Place
The FEATURECLA column answers it. 482 Admin-1 capitals, 414 plain
populated places, 202 national capitals, and some surprises, 40
Antarctic research stations including Amundsen-Scott at exactly 90
degrees south, 13 alternate capitals such as The Hague and Lagos, and
one historic place, the abandoned Siberian port of Ambarchik with
population zero. Filter on it before counting cities.
Quick Start
The data asset is GeoParquet 2.0 with a native geometry type and a covering bbox column, so it needs a GeoPandas built on pyarrow 24 or newer. DuckDB spatial queries the same file in place, see AGENTS.md for those patterns. Paths are relative to this directory, and the same code works against the published URL.
Sizing and Filtering Labels
The cartographic columns are the point of this theme. Natural Earth's
guidance is to size labels from POP_MAX and thin them with the scale
rankings, and MIN_ZOOM maps that to web-map zoom levels directly.
Schema, the Columns That Matter
Nineteen of the 140 columns cover most uses.
Column
Type
Description
SCALERANK
integer
Importance rank 0 to 10, 0 most important. Filter on it to thin labels by zoom.
FEATURECLA
varchar
What kind of place this is. Admin-0 capital, Admin-1 capital, Populated place, Scientific station, and four rarer classes.
NAME
varchar
Display name with diacritics, for example Neuquén. Not unique, several city names repeat across countries.
NAMEASCII
varchar
ASCII fallback spelling of the name.
ADM0CAP
integer
1 marks a national capital, 200 rows in this file.
WORLDCITY
integer
1 flags 70 globally prominent cities.
MEGACITY
integer
1 flags the 462 places Natural Earth treats as megacities.
ADM0NAME
varchar
Country name the point belongs to.
The table has 140 columns in all. The full list with types lives in table:columns on the data asset.
Limitations
A curated cartographic layer, not a gazetteer and not a demographic
dataset. Absence means Natural Earth chose not to include a town, not
that it does not exist, and the population figures are 2019-era
estimates for label sizing, not census data. POP_MAX counts the
metro area and POP_MIN the city proper, so ranking cities without
picking one deliberately mixes definitions. Names repeat, Mérida,
Portland, and Valencia each appear twice, so use NE_ID as the key.