Towns within a radius (worldwide)

How to use it

Set the center by searching for a place, using your location or tapping the map, then choose the radius, up to 500 miles or 500 km. You can also drag the edge of the circle on the map to change the radius, or its center to move it. The list is sorted by distance and shows each place’s population, region and country, and the direction it lies in (north, southeast…).

Use “Minimum population” to keep only the bigger places: 500, 1,000, 5,000, 10,000, 50,000, 100,000 or a million. If the circle crosses a border, you can switch countries off. Tap a place to see it on the map, sort the list by name or population, copy it or download it as a CSV. The link keeps the circle so you can share it.

30 miles around Manchester

Within 30 miles (48.3 km) of Manchester there are 314 towns and cities, adding up to 6,767,156 people; 135 of them have 10,000 or more. The biggest are Manchester (568,996), Bradford (366,187), Preston (313,332) and Oldham (237,110), and the closest to the center, apart from Manchester itself, is Salford (1.9 mi). The list also shows 28 neighborhoods, which aren’t added to the total.

Which places are listed

The data comes from GeoNames, an open geographical database (CC BY 4.0): 236,659 towns, cities and neighborhoods around the world with 500 people or more, plus local government seats even when they’re smaller. Each place is a point, usually its center, and it counts when that point is within the radius.

We leave out places that no longer exist (historical, abandoned or destroyed) and duplicates: the same name in the same country less than 3 km apart is listed once, keeping the one with more people.

Names are the ones GeoNames uses: the usual English name for well-known cities (Munich, Cologne, Mexico City) and the local name, in the Latin alphabet, for the rest. Regions are the first-level divisions of each country (states, provinces, regions), and countries are named in English.

The population and the total

Each population is the figure GeoNames has for that place, taken from each country’s censuses and official estimates, so years differ. It tells you whether a place is a village or a city, but don’t expect this year’s number. A few local seats have no population: they show a dash and drop out as soon as you set a minimum.

The total adds up the places in the list; it isn’t the population of the area. A town counts in full even if part of it is outside the circle, and people in the countryside or in places under 500 aren’t counted. To know how many people live inside the circle, use Population in a radius, which works it out from population grids and census data.

In Spain and the US, use their own tools

Two countries have tools with official data: Towns in a radius (Spain), with the INE municipal register for every Spanish municipality, and Cities in a radius, with Census Bureau population for every US city, town and census-designated place. If your circle falls in either, this tool tells you and takes you there with the same circle.

What it’s good for

Planning day trips from where you’re staying, checking which towns are within commuting distance before you move, drawing a delivery or sales territory, or building a list of cities for a campaign in another country. Searches like “towns within 50 km of Manchester” or “cities within 100 miles of Toronto” take one step: search the place, set the radius, read the list.