French cities with 50,000 inhabitants or more.
Format
A data.frame with 121 rows and 10 columns
- id
The INSEE code of the city according to the official geographical code of 2025 (OGC)
- name
The name of the city
- department
The code of the department of the city in the OGC (see french_departments)
- region
The code of the region of the city in the OGC (see french_regions)
- population
The population of the city in 2022
- area
The area of the city in square kilometres
- th_longitude
The longitude of the town hall of the city (epsg:4326)
- th_latitude
The latitude of the town hall of the city (epsg:4326)
- centre_longitude
The longitude of the centre of the city (epsg:4326)
- centre_latitude
The latitude of the centre of the city (epsg:4326)
Source
INSEE Population census - Main extraction (2022) https://catalogue-donnees.insee.fr/en/catalogue/recherche/DS_RP_POPULATION_PRINC
INSEE Official Geographical Code (2025) https://www.data.gouv.fr/datasets/code-officiel-geographique-cog/ https://www.data.gouv.fr/api/1/datasets/r/91a95bee-c7c8-45f9-a8aa-f14cc4697545
Geo API (2025) https://geo.api.gouv.fr/
Details
This data set describes all cities of Metropolitan France with 50,000 or more inhabitants in 2022, excluding Corsican cities. It contains 121 cities described by 10 variables. The data frame is sorted in decreasing order of population, making it straightforward to select the most populous cities. The same order is used for the rows and columns of the distance matrices french_cities_distances and french_cities_times.
The population and administrative information was collected from the INSEE open data in November 2025. These data are distributed under the French "Open Licence". Geographical coordinates and areas were obtained from the Geo API in November 2025 and are also available under the French "Open Licence".