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")