Geocoding Databases for Europe

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Databases including latitudes and longitudes of cities and postcodes of most European countries for free download

Soon after publishing Tableau Custom Geocoding outside the US and UK, I received a very interesting email from Richard van Dijk. Richard obviously liked yesterday’s article and he is kind and generous enough to share great geographical databases of European cities and postcodes with us. See a Tableau visualization of the postcodes on a European map in the screenshot left. The databases include the geographical data of more than 250,000 European cites and more than 296,000 postcodes.

Richard pulled this data out of a 2009 download from geonames.org. With a little help from the Tableau Support team he converted these downloads into geocoding databases accessible with Tableau Software.

Here is a zipped folder including both databases as CSV files in US standard (point as decimal separator, comma as field separator) for free download:

Download European Cities and Postcodes US Standard (zipped folder, 3638.3K)

And here is the same data using the European standard (comma as decimal separator, semicolon as field separator):

Download European Cities and Postcodes EU Standard (zipped folder, 3638.5K)

Please be advised that the data does not cover all countries in Europe: Ireland, Greece, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Romania, Serbia, Montenegro, Albania, Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic States are not included. Furthermore there seem to be some smaller inaccuracies in the European city database. Have a closer look at Spain or Italy for instance.

Nevertheless, these databases are enormously helpful if you want to import Custom Geocoding into Tableau Software and create a higher level of detail in your geographical visualizations of Europe.

Many thanks again, Richard. Your contribution is highly appreciated.

Please visit also Richard’s profile on LinkedIn and follow him on Twitter.

Finally, may I ask you a favor? If you like Richard’s data and find it useful for your own work, I would highly appreciate if you could drop him a line in a comment here to say thank you for sharing. We shouldn’t take it like a duck to water that Richard is so generous to share his work with us.

Comments

14 responses to “Geocoding Databases for Europe”

December 27, 2010

Alexandre

hi Robert,
Maybe I missed something but it looks like that a unique id is missing in the 2 csv files if you want to have the postal code, the city name and the geocode.

Reply
December 27, 2010

Robert

Alexandre,
thanks for your comment.
You are right, there is no unique ID to match the postcodes of the post code database with the city names of the city database.
The 2 CSV-files Richard provided are stand-alone databases with no link in between.

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February 9, 2011

Thomas

Thanks Richard, for sharing your useful geocoding database files with us, I highly appreciate it!
Best,
Thomas

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April 28, 2012

Jiri

Hi, good stuff though for CZ (and some other countries likely as well) city names seem obscured. Would it be possible to provide UTF-8 encoded files?

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April 28, 2012

Robert

Jiri,
thanks for your comment. Unfortunately I do not have the same database in UTF-8. I am sorry.
Maybe some of the open source geocoding projects like opengeocode.org can help you.

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January 18, 2013

Tomek

What is this file encodeing? I can’t get special chars.

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January 18, 2013

Robert

Tomek,
I am sorry, I do not understand your question. The files are CSV files and you can open them with Excel or any text editor. What do you mean by “can’t get special chars”?

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January 17, 2014

Movie

Hello,
Country European City
CZ Be?ice
CZ Be?ov
CZ Be?ov nad Teplou
CZ Be?ovice
CZ Be?ovy
CZ Be?vry
DE Mncheberg
DE Mnchehofe
DE Mnchen
DE Mnchenbernsdorf
DE Mnchengladbach
I think that he mean that some Letters not in it, so that it was wrong/korrupted in Name. München / Mönchengladbach for DE-City.

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January 17, 2014

Robert

Movie,
thanks for the clarification. True, German Umlaute and other additional characters are not included. For this, the file would have to be in UTF-8 format, but unfortunately, I do not have the database in UTF-8 (as mentioned in my reply to Jiri’s comment above).

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April 3, 2016

Ervin Ruci

I imported some of your data on http://geocode.xyz and cross-referenced it with geonames/openstreetmap data to fix utf8 problems. Thanks for making this data available.

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April 12, 2016

LAdislav

Hello, please do you have UTF-8 database?

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April 19, 2016

Ervin Ruci

Yes. All our data is UTF-8.

Reply
June 15, 2018

Ramon

Seems for Germany there are leading zeros missing on some zipcodes (the ones with four digits). May be it’s the same for other countries as well.

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September 22, 2019

Selim Khan

Thank you very much Robert and thank so much to Richard- these are the data I was looking for georeferencing my data got from Sweden. Hope these will work. Best regards,Selim Khan, Postdoctoral fellow, University of Calgary, AB.

Reply