The place layer consists out of countries, states, cities and islands. Apart from the roads this is also one of the more important layers to create a beautiful map. We suggest you use different font styles and sizes to create a text hierarchy.
Fields
name
The OSM name value of the place. Language-specific values are in name:xx (please see the languages section).
name_en
English name name:en if available, otherwise name. This is deprecated and will be removed in a future release in favor of name:en.
name_de
German name name:de if available, otherwise name or name:en. This is deprecated and will be removed in a future release in favor of name:de.
capital
The capital field marks the
admin_level
of the boundary the place is a capital of.
Possible values:
23456
class
Original value of the
place tag.
Distinguish between continents, countries, states, islands and
places like settlements or smaller entities.
Use class to separately style the different places and build
a text hierarchy according to their importance.
Possible values:
continentcountrystateprovincecitytownvillagehamletboroughsuburbquarterneighbourhoodisolated_dwellingisland
iso_a2
Two-letter country code ISO 3166-1 alpha-2. Available only for class=country.
Original value of the
country_code_iso3166_1_alpha_2 tag.
rank
Countries, states and the most important cities all have a
rank to boost their importance on the map.
The rank field for countries and states ranges from
0 to 6 while the rank field for cities ranges from
1 to 10 for the most important cities
and continues from 10 serially based on the
local importance of the city (derived from population and city class).
You can use the rank to limit density of labels or improve
the text hierarchy.
The rank value is a combination of the Natural Earth
scalerank, labelrank and datarank values for countries
and states and for cities consists out of a shifted
Natural Earth scalerank combined with a local rank
within a grid for cities that do not have a Natural Earth scalerank.