Description

The Gazetteer of British Columbia is a spreadsheet of all official place names, including feature type, feature code, mapsheet, and latitude & longitude. The Gazetteer is extracted from the BC Geographical Names Information System (BCGNIS), the master database of British Columbia place names. The BC Gazetteer is available as a zipped SHP file, CSV or XLSX. See also BC Geographical Names (https://catalogue.data.gov.bc.ca/dataset/43805524-4add-4474-ad53-1a985930f352) dataset for other formats and download options. **Some software (including MS Excel) may assume the wrong encoding when the .csv file is opened**, and this can cause names with special characters to be presented incorrectly. With whatever software you use to open the .csv file, it is recommended to open the file in a way that explicitly acknowledges the UTF-8 character encoding. Alternatively, **the Gazetteer is also available in .xlsx format which is recommended for MS Excel users** because it will automatically recognize the correct character encoding.

Resources

Name	Format	Description	Link
Feature Type Definitions	PDF		https://apps.gov.bc.ca/pub/bcgnws/featureTypes?outputFormat=pdf
Original metadata (https://catalogue.data.gov.bc.ca)	HTML		https://catalogue.data.gov.bc.ca/dataset/bc-gazetteer
BC_GAZETTEER (SHP)	ZIP		https://catalogue.data.gov.bc.ca/dataset/d92224ee-03ef-4904-be53-b677d8e01ac4/resource/4257dcea-fdff-40c2-bfd1-60f1822c2c56/download/bc-gazetteer-2026-08-12.zip
BC_GAZETTEER (XLSX)	XLS		https://catalogue.data.gov.bc.ca/dataset/d92224ee-03ef-4904-be53-b677d8e01ac4/resource/61fe6b30-e0ac-4694-bab9-a02f11bc8baf/download/bc-gazetteer-2026-08-12.xlsx
BC_GAZETTEER (CSV)	CSV		https://catalogue.data.gov.bc.ca/dataset/d92224ee-03ef-4904-be53-b677d8e01ac4/resource/69738aa8-2cc0-4975-aec6-4dc2e30990bf/download/bc-gazetteer-2026-08-12.csv

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