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.