Shapefile of European Union regions and districts

Question

I'm looking for a shapefile containing all EU countries / regions / districts / city boundaries.

Answer 1

The Global Administrative Areas dataset is available as a shapefile or file geodatabase;

http://gadm.org/

Also as several other handy formats (only available when you download an individual country though);

• Geopackage
• Google Earth KMZ
• R SpatialPolygonsDataFrame

Given you're interested in Europe it might be best to download the whole globe (found here http://gadm.org/version2) and clip down to your area.

Answer 2

You can use OpenStreetMap data. Just download the Europe dump and process it.

For example,

$ wget http://download.geofabrik.de/europe-latest.osm.pbf

$ osmosis --read-pbf europe.osm.pbf --tf accept-ways "boundary=administrative" --used-node --write-pbf boundaries.osm.pbf

$ ogr2ogr -f SQLite boundaries.sqlite boundaries.osm.pbf

It will create a SQLite database that you can use to create the shapefile in Qgis or with more ogr2ogr processing.

For more explanations about boundary tag, check http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:boundary%3Dadministrative

Answer 3

For data sets and services, that provide access to such data sets, for the European Union (EU) you should look at the INSPIRE GeoPortal

Answer 4

I found EuroGlobalMap

EuroGlobalMap is a 1:1 million scale topographic dataset covering 45 countries and territories in the European region.

The dataset contains six themes:

Administrative boundaries
The water network
Tranport networks
Settlements
Elevation
Names locations