Possible duplicate with [How to open a Shapefile in R?][1] There are many packages to read shapefiles: - [rgdal][2] with [readOGR][3] (examples) and [Read and write ESRI Shapefiles with R][4], pointed out by Joseph - [maptools][5] with [ReadShapePoint][6], [readShapeLines][7],[readShapePoly][8] and [readShapeSpatial][9] as Tumbledown show ( and [Read and write ESRI Shapefiles with R][10]) - [PBSmapping][11] with [importShapefile][12] (examples) and [Read and write ESRI Shapefiles with R][13], pointed out by Joseph - [shapefiles][14] with [readshapefile][15] (examples) - [raster][16] with [shapefile][17] (examples) - [dismo][18] with [shapefile][19] (examples) - [fastshp][20]`with [read.shp][21] (examples) - [RSAGA][22] - ... [1]: https://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/19064/how-to-open-a-shapefile-in-r [2]: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/rgdal/rgdal.pdf [3]: https://www.rdocumentation.org/packages/gdalUtils/versions/2.0.1.7/topics/ogrinfo [4]: https://www.nceas.ucsb.edu/scicomp/usecases/ReadWriteESRIShapeFiles [5]: http://www.inside-r.org/packages/cran/maptools [6]: https://www.rdocumentation.org/packages/maptools/versions/0.8-39/topics/readShapePoints [7]: https://www.rdocumentation.org/packages/maptools/versions/0.8-39/topics/readShapeLines [8]: https://www.rdocumentation.org/packages/maptools/versions/0.8-39/topics/readShapePoly [9]: https://www.rdocumentation.org/packages/maptools/versions/0.8-39/topics/readShapeSpatial [10]: https://www.nceas.ucsb.edu/scicomp/usecases/ReadWriteESRIShapeFiles [11]: http://www.inside-r.org/packages/cran/pbsmapping [12]: http://www.inside-r.org/packages/cran/pbsmapping/docs/importShapefile [13]: https://www.nceas.ucsb.edu/scicomp/usecases/ReadWriteESRIShapeFiles [14]: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/shapefiles/shapefiles.pdf [15]: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/shapefiles/shapefiles.pdf [16]: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/raster/raster.pdf [17]: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/raster/raster.pdf [18]: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/dismo/dismo.pdf [19]: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/dismo/dismo.pdf [20]: http://www.rforge.net/fastshp/index.html [21]: http://www.rforge.net/doc/packages/fastshp/html/00Index.htm [22]: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/RSAGA/RSAGA.pdf