Story · Europe map · about 3 min
Why Europe lives low
Europe’s mountains make the postcards, but its people live almost entirely on low ground. This tour sets the population grid beside the height of the land to show how strongly the two are linked, and where the exceptions are.
Where people are
The population grid for 2020 puts about 660 million people inside this map’s window in the countries Natural Earth files under Europe. The window is a rectangle, so it also takes in Turkey, the Caucasus and the North African coast: 1,044 million people in all. Dark blue and purple squares are cities; the pale ones are almost empty.
The height of the land
Now the same window without the people: height in eleven bands, with shaded relief on top. The Alps, the Pyrenees, the Carpathians and the Caucasus stand out at once. The highest cell in the whole window is 5,557 metres, near Mount Elbrus. It is a surface model, so it includes buildings and tree canopy. Heights are averaged over 500 metres, so the Zuidplaspolder near Rotterdam, famous for lying below sea level, reads only about -5 metres.
Two in three live below 200 metres
Put the two together and the pattern is plain. Of the people in Europe, 43% live below 100 metres, 71% below 200 metres and only 7.6% above 500 metres. Above 1,000 metres it is 0.4%, about one person in 250. Counting the whole window, with Turkey and the Nile delta, the figures are 47%, 68% and 14%.
The Alps are a hole, the Po plain is not
Zoom in on northern Italy. The Alps show almost no people at all, while the Po plain below them is a dense carpet of towns, with Milan and Turin among the dark knots at its western end. The people did not choose the mountains: farmland, water and flat ground to build on are all down here.
The exceptions stand on plateaus
A few big cities do sit high. Madrid stands on Spain’s central plateau, and the grid reads about 675 metres for its square, the dark knot in the middle of the peninsula; the other dense places hug the coast. Ankara, on Turkey’s plateau, reads about 850 metres.
For classrooms and curious minds
Questions to talk about, alone or in a group.
- Why might a surface model make a city such as Rotterdam or Paris look higher than the ground it stands on?
- The population grid is a model scaled to national totals. Why is it better for comparing regions than for counting the people of one village?
Try it on the map: Switch on the elevation layer, then population density, and find a large city above 500 metres. What is it doing there?
The figures above are calculated from the datasets listed on Data & sources and are approximate: many map layers are modelled or interpolated. Read each layer’s caveats on the map.