# How to create a simple map with custom "base" shapefile + data to plot on a separate CSV file

**URL:** <https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-to-create-a-simple-map-with-custom-base-shapefile-data-to-plot-on-a-separate-csv-file/34580>\
**Category:** General Usage\
**Tags:** plotting, shapefile\
**Created:** [February 13, 2020, 2:56pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-to-create-a-simple-map-with-custom-base-shapefile-data-to-plot-on-a-separate-csv-file/34580 "2020-02-13T14:56:38Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 3

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![visr](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/visr/32/17204_2.png) [@visr](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/visr)\
**Post date:** [February 13, 2020, 4:53pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-to-create-a-simple-map-with-custom-base-shapefile-data-to-plot-on-a-separate-csv-file/34580/3 "2020-02-13T16:53:23Z")

</div>

To add to what David said, there are also some more examples on making choropleth maps in [U.S. Counties Choropleth](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/u-s-counties-choropleth/20845).

For reading shapefiles there is [GitHub - JuliaGeo/Shapefile.jl: Parsing .shp files in Julia](https://github.com/JuliaGeo/Shapefile.jl). Through the GeoInterface it has plot recipes defined so you can do this:

```julia
using Plots, Shapefile
shp = Shapefile.shapes(Shapefile.Table("data.shp"))
plot(shp)

```

(I think you can color in the polygons yourself as well, don’t have an example at hand though).

Another project to watch is [GitHub - JuliaPlots/GeoMakie.jl: Geographical plotting utilities for Makie.jl](https://github.com/JuliaPlots/GeoMakie.jl), which is still in early development, but shows promising visuals and performance for plotting both geospatial feature and raster data.

But indeed, if you first convert your data to GeoJSON/TopoJSON, then probably VegaLite will be the easiest.

---

_[View the full topic](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-to-create-a-simple-map-with-custom-base-shapefile-data-to-plot-on-a-separate-csv-file/34580)._