Natural Earth Populated Places
Quick answer: Natural Earth Populated Places provides a curated global city layer for basemaps and reference work, with a hosted 110m GeoJSON here and a downloadable 10m GeoJSON and Shapefile for detailed cartography.
Choose reference cities or inspect the OSM snapshot
- 1.For a compact country selection, use the Natural Earth 10m tools. These contain selected cities and towns, not every settlement.
- 2.For OpenStreetMap settlements, use the separate OSM global dataset linked here. Its per-country extracts are unavailable; it is a different source with different coverage.
- 3.Keep the original source fields and attribution. Query the Natural Earth reference or your own point file by distance, then export the matching points.
About this dataset
Curated global cities and towns with population ranks from Natural Earth — hosted as a 110m GeoJSON with an instant map and population summary.
Natural Earth Populated Places is the reference settlement layer for basemaps and cartography; the full 10m release carries over 7,000 places. This page hosts the lightweight 1:110m selection (the 243 most significant cities and towns, ~48 KB) so the map and population summary load without any download — a bundled 10m GeoJSON adds 7,342 reference places with country codes for local queries. Natural Earth is a cartographic selection, not a complete town directory or current census.
Actual dataset map screenshot; map and basemap credits are shown in the image. Captured 30 September 2026.
How to download
- 1 Read the hosted preview above — the summary breaks places down by country and population class.
- 2 Download the hosted 110m GeoJSON when you need a lightweight city layer for a web map.
- 3 For more reference places, download the bundled 10m GeoJSON or choose a country in the cities download tool. Historic population values are cartographic references.
- 4 Style by population rank in GIS or filter to capitals using the admin attributes.
Bundled 10m GeoJSON · 7,342 places
Natural Earth v5.1.2, 225 ADM0 country/territory codes; selected settlements, about 2.5 MB
10m source and field notes
Version, upstream source, attribution and coverage
Hosted 110m GeoJSON (map preview above)
243 major places with population estimates, ~48 KB
Natural Earth download
Shapefile (10m scale, 7,000+ places)
GeoJSON on GitHub
GeoJSON version of the 10m layer
FAQ
How many places?
The 10m layer carries over 7,000 settlements; the 110m layer hosted here keeps the 243 most significant places so the preview stays instant.
What is SCALERANK?
Population importance ranking from 1 (megacities) to 10 (small towns) in the full layer.
Where do the population figures come from?
POP_MAX is Natural Earth's harmonised urban-population estimate per place. It is a cartographic reference value, not an official census — pair it with WorldPop or UN WPP figures for demographic analysis.
Can I use these points as map labels?
Yes. The NAME / NAMEASCII fields suit label rendering, and the population attribute lets you filter to major cities at low zoom levels.