Database of major cities&towns of each country with latitude & longitude

Question

I´m looking for a database of the major cities and towns of each country.

Most services have databases of millions of places (like this one https://www.maxmind.com/en/free-world-cities-database), but for my purposes that is way too detailed.

I think that roughly about 70 places per million people should cover all major places in our world. Therefore I´m looking for a database of about 300 000 - 400 000 entries, all countries listed. The maxmind database could be filtered to only contain the major ones but for most entries the population data is missing.

Anyone know where/how to get such database?

Answer 1

You can use that csv database : http://download.geonames.org/export/dump/cities15000.zip which contains the worldwide cities (lat,lng) with more than 15000 inhabitants.

Because it also contains the population, you can easily filter to only have very big cities.

Answer 2

You could use one of these :

• ~100 000 records
• ~300 000 records but some in specific languages like chinese