Extracting cities in Belgium using overpass API?

Question

I would like to extract all the cities in Belgium using the overpass API.I used the following query:

area[name="België - Belgique - Belgien"]->.boundaryarea;
(
  node(area.boundaryarea)[place="city"];
);

out;

But got no result. Am I doing something wrong?

---

This appears to work but I have no idea why

{{geocodeArea:Netherlands}}->.searchArea;
(
nwr["place"="city"](area.searchArea);
);
out body;

Answer 1

According to https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/52411 you need to use area[name="België / Belgique / Belgien"], and not as you stated area[name="België - Belgique - Belgien"] (note the typo, the name tag has to match exactly!).

In case case, I would highly recommend to use some more stable identifier instead, e.g. area["ISO3166-1"="BE"][boundary=administrative].

Full query:

area["ISO3166-1"="BE"][boundary=administrative];
node(area)[place="city"];
out body;