French cities with 50,000 inhabitants or more.
Format
A data.frame with 121 rows and 9 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
Area of the city in squared kilometers
- th_latitude
The latitude of the of town hall the city (epsg:4326)
- th_longitude
The longitude of the town hall of the city (epsg:4326)
- center_latitude
The latitude of the centre of the city (epsg:4326)
- center_longitude
The longitude 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 Metropolitan France cities with 50,000 or more inhabitants in 2022, excluding Corsican cities. It contains 121 cities described by 8 variables. The data frame is sorted in decreasing population order, making it straightforward to select the most populated cities. The same order is used for rows and columns in 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 have been obtained from the Geo API in November 2025 and are also available under the French "Open Licence".