Seeking Colombia municipality geometries

Question

I'm looking for shapefiles (or some similar format) of Colombia's municipality boundaries.

Wikipedia has a map that seems to be correct and which matches another dataset that I will eventually be merging in based on municipality names and DANE codes. I've tried contacting the file creator about the underlying source data, but without success.

I've tried GADM, but some of the municipalities are missing/incorrect, e.g. all the way in the South Amazons should have 11 municipalities, not 8.

Here's OpenStreeMap with data export via Mapzen. Many municipalities are simply just missing, although the borders for those that are there appear to be correct and more detailed than GADM.

I guess I could try to combine departments that OpenStreeMap had all municipalities for with the GADM data, but it looks like that would still only partially get me there. And in general it just makes me a bit suspicious about using the GADM data at all.

Answer 1

You can try the WFS or WMS servers of the Instituto Geográfico Agustín Codazzi (here:http://www.igac.gov.co/wps/portal/igac/raiz/iniciohome/MapasdeColombia/Descargas).

These services have different layers for geodesic features and demographics.

If that doesn't work, you can check this link with the shapefile I use for Colombian municipalities: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/i0ao837gj5wpkic/AAAnzZf-tJIKUmZvTKrvXPMpa?dl=0

Answer 2

Colombia's National Administrative Department of Statistics hosts shapefiles that have official municipality boundaries here: https://geoportal.dane.gov.co/?descarga-marco-geoestadistico-nacional

Also, as of today, GADM is still missing municipalities in Amazonas, and in the OpenStreetMap data, some municipal boundaries intersect their neighbors.

Edit: Possibly this link is nicer (the CSS on the first link isn't great for some browsers/viewport sizes): https://geoportal.dane.gov.co/metadatos/descarga_mgn/

Answer 3

In case someone else serves you, here are a set of examples you create visualizing the municipalities of Colombia from a geojson file that I managed to achieve

https://bl.ocks.org/john-guerra/727e8992e9599b9d9f1dbfdc4c8e479e

If you look at my bl.ocks.org/john-warra you can see more examples, but stackexchange will not let me upload more than two links

And here's a react component you create to make it easy to create these maps

https://github.com/john-guerra/ColombiaVisualizationReact

Answer 4

Districts/Boroughs in Bogotá are called Localidades. You can download them from the Infraestructura de Datos Espaciales para el Distrito Capital * (IDECA) website, specifically here.

In the case of Medellín, these are called Comunas and can be found on the map catalogue's webpage from the town/municipal hall, specifically here.

^{* Roughly translates to Spatial Data Infraestrcuture for the Capital District.}