How to highlight a specific country using Cartopy

In our previous posts, e.g. How to draw Africa map using Cartopy we showed how to draw an overview map of an entire continent using Cartopy. This post provides an example of how to highlight a specific country in that map. In this example, we’ll highlight Kenya

The general approach is:

1. Use cartopy.io.shapereader.natural_earth to download Natural Earth data that contains the shape of Kenya
2. Convert it to a cartopy.feature.ShapelyFeature
3. Display said feature

Displaying Kenya’s Natural Earth shape in cartopy

First, we create a Reader for the Natural Earth data. Cartopy will automatically download the data if it has not been cached.

import cartopy.io.shapereader as shpreader

shpfilename = shpreader.natural_earth(resolution='110m',
                                      category='cultural',
                                      name='admin_0_countries')
reader = shpreader.Reader(shpfilename)

Now we can select Kenya by name from the records:

kenya = [country for country in reader.records() if country.attributes["NAME_LONG"] == "Kenya"][0]

In order to display that geometry, we use

shape_feature = ShapelyFeature([kenya.geometry], ccrs.PlateCarree(), facecolor="lime", edgecolor='black', lw=1)
ax.add_feature(shape_feature)

Complete example code

import cartopy.crs as ccrs
import cartopy.feature as cf
from cartopy.feature import ShapelyFeature
from matplotlib import pyplot as plt

proj = ccrs.PlateCarree()
ax = plt.axes(projection=proj)
# Show only Africa
ax.set_extent([-23, 55, -35, 40])
ax.stock_img()

ax.add_feature(cf.COASTLINE, lw=2)
# Make figure larger
plt.gcf().set_size_inches(20, 10)

# Read Natural Earth data
import cartopy.io.shapereader as shpreader

shpfilename = shpreader.natural_earth(resolution='110m',
                                      category='cultural',
                                      name='admin_0_countries')
reader = shpreader.Reader(shpfilename)
kenya = [country for country in reader.records() if country.attributes["NAME_LONG"] == "Kenya"][0]

# Display Kenya's shape
shape_feature = ShapelyFeature([kenya.geometry], ccrs.PlateCarree(), facecolor="lime", edgecolor='black', lw=1)
ax.add_feature(shape_feature)

# Save figure as SVG
plt.savefig("Africa-Highlight-Kenya.svg")