How to plot Shapefile data in Cartopy

In order to display shapefile data in Cartopy, we can first use the cartopy.io.shapereader package to read the shape data and then convert the geometry we want to display to a cartopy.feature.ShapelyFeature.

In the following example, we’ll read the Natural Earth ne_110m_admin_0_countries.shp and Note that there’s an easier way to plot Natural Earth data using shpreader.natural_earth - see How to highlight a specific country using Cartopy and we’ll use the Natural Earth dataset just as an example!

import cartopy.io.shapereader as shpreader
# Read shape file
reader = shpreader.Reader("ne_110m_admin_0_countries.shp")
# Filter for a specific country
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)

Complete code example

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)

import cartopy.io.shapereader as shpreader
# Read shape file
reader = shpreader.Reader("ne_110m_admin_0_countries.shp")
# Filter for a specific country
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")