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 the full 10m shapefile for detailed cartography.
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 — the 10m shapefile stays one click away for detailed work.
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 city-level detail, grab the 10m shapefile and join it to your own population data.
- 4 Style by population rank in GIS or filter to capitals using the admin attributes.
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.