Day 1: Points

Every populated place in Canada, one dot each: 29,749 cities, towns, villages, hamlets and named localities from the Canadian Geographical Names Database.

points.json

Loading 29,749 places

Click a dot for its name.

This map counts places, not people. A hamlet of forty gets a dot like a suburb of forty thousand, and the size of a dot shows only what kind of place it is. Even so, three dots in four sit south of 50° north, and only 456 are north of 60.

Quebec has the most named places, 7,973, and Ontario follows with 6,679. Nova Scotia, with 2,838, has more than British Columbia. Show only cities, towns and villages and the order changes: Saskatchewan is second with 686, and Ontario, where most villages are now part of larger municipalities, drops to 172.

On the prairies the dots fall in rows. About 1,750 of the names are railway points or stops, put down every few kilometres along the lines, and many outlived the stations they named.

1,224 of the names carry a recorded language, almost all of them Indigenous: Inuktitut, Innu, Mi'kmaw, Cree and more than sixty others. Click a dot to see it.

How it's made

One basemap and one layer. This is the whole map, minus the legend.

import { createMap } from '@unmap/sdk'

const map = createMap({
  key: 'um_live_...',
  container: '#map',
  style: 'muted',
  maplibre: { bounds: [[-136, 44], [-55, 66]] },
})

map.on('load', async () => {
  const places = await fetch('/places.geojson').then((r) => r.json())
  map.addSource('places', { type: 'geojson', data: places })
  map.addLayer({
    id: 'places',
    type: 'circle',
    source: 'places',
    paint: { 'circle-radius': 1.4, 'circle-color': '#FF3E9A', 'circle-opacity': 0.8 },
  })
})

The data is the national CSV from the Canadian Geographical Names Database, filtered to the Populated Place category and joined so a place with two official names is one dot. A short script in the unmap repository turns it into a compact file the page loads. The basemap is unmap's muted style, which is greyscale so the data carries all the colour. The page and the script were written with an AI coding assistant (Claude).

Data

Canadian Geographical Names Database, Natural Resources Canada. Contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence - Canada. File published 27 October 2026.

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