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Natural Earth Populated Places

Natural Earth Populated Places provides a curated global city layer for basemap and reference use.

Format Shapefile / GeoJSON
Coverage Global
Resolution Settlement points
License Public domain
Update Versioned releases

Format

Shapefile / GeoJSON

Geometry

Point (populated places)

Coverage

Global

Resolution

Settlement points

About this dataset

Curated global cities and towns with population ranks and feature classification from Natural Earth.

Natural Earth Populated Places provides over 7,000 settlements globally with population ranks, administrative capitals, and feature types — ideal for lightweight basemap reference layers.

Basemap reference City mapping Thematic cartography

How to download

  1. 1 Open the Natural Earth download page.
  2. 2 Choose 10m scale populated places.
  3. 3 Download the shapefile.
  4. 4 Style by population rank in GIS.

FAQ

How many places?

Over 7,000 settlements globally from small towns to megacities.

What is SCALERANK?

Population importance ranking from 1 (megacities) to 10 (small towns).