Admin 0 – Countries

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There are 258 countries in the world. Greenland as separate from Denmark. Most users will want this file instead of sovereign states, though some users will want map units instead when needing to distinguish overseas regions of France.

Natural Earth shows de facto boundaries by default according to who controls the territory, versus de jure. Optional point-of-view (POV) variants are available for several dozen countries in the next section. 

Download countries (4.7 MB) version 5.1.1
Download without boundary lakes (4.87 MB) version 5.1.1

About

Countries distinguish between metropolitan (homeland) and independent and semi-independent portions of sovereign states. If you want to see the dependent overseas regions broken out (like in ISO codes, see France for example), use map units instead.

Each country is coded with a world region that roughly follows the United Nations setup.

Countries are coded with standard ISO and FIPS codes. French INSEE codes are also included.

Includes some thematic data from the United Nations (1), U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, and elsewhere.

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Disclaimer

Natural Earth Vector draws boundaries of countries according to defacto status. We show who actually controls the situation on the ground. Please feel free to mashup our disputed area themes to match your particular political outlook.

Known Problems

None.

Version History

The master changelog is available on Github »

This entry was posted on Friday, September 25th, 2009 at 2:13 am and is filed under 10m-cultural-vectors, Featured on Homepage. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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