place

The place layer consists out of countries, states, cities and islands. Apart from the roads this is also one of the more important layers to create a beautiful map. We suggest you use different font styles and sizes to create a text hierarchy.

Fields

name

The OSM name value of the place. Language-specific values are in name:xx.

name_en

English name name:en if available, otherwise name. This is deprecated and will be removed in a future release in favor of name:en.

name_de

German name name:de if available, otherwise name or name:en. This is deprecated and will be removed in a future release in favor of name:de.

capital

The capital field marks the admin_level of the boundary the place is a capital of.

Possible values:

class

Original value of the place tag. Distinguish between continents, countries, states, islands and places like settlements or smaller entities. Use class to separately style the different places and build a text hierarchy according to their importance. For places derived from boundaries, the original value of the boundary tag.

Possible values:

continent
country
state
province
city
town
village
hamlet
borough
suburb
quarter
neighbourhood
isolated_dwelling
island
aboriginal_lands

iso_a2

Two-letter country code ISO 3166-1 alpha-2. Available only for class=country. Original value of the country_code_iso3166_1_alpha_2 tag.

rank

Countries, states and the most important cities all have a rank to boost their importance on the map. The rank field for countries and states ranges from 1 to 6 while the rank field for cities ranges from 1 to 10 for the most important cities and continues from 10 serially based on the local importance of the city (derived from population and city class). You can use the rank to limit density of labels or improve the text hierarchy. The rank value is a combination of the Natural Earth scalerank, labelrank and datarank values for countries and states and for cities consists out of a shifted Natural Earth scalerank combined with a local rank within a grid for cities that do not have a Natural Earth scalerank.