Introduction

geoplotlib is an open-source Python library for geospatial data visualizations. It has a wide range of geographical visualizations and supports hardware acceleration. It also provides performance rendering for large datasets with millions of data points. As discussed in earlier chapters, Matplotlib provides various ways to visualize geographical data.

However, Matplotlib is not designed for this task because its interfaces are complicated and inconvenient to use. Matplotlib also restricts how geographical data can be displayed. The Basemap and Cartopy libraries allow you to plot on a world map, but these packages do not support drawing on map tiles. Map tiles are underlying rectangular, square, or hexagonal tile slabs that are used to create a seamless map of the world, with lightweight, individually requested tiles that are currently in view.

geoplotlib, on the other hand, was designed precisely for this purpose; it not only provides map tiles but also allows for...