read_metro_area: Download spatial data of official metropolitan areas in...

In geobr: Download Official Spatial Data Sets of Brazil

Download spatial data of official metropolitan areas in Brazil

Description

The function returns the shapes of municipalities grouped by their respective metro areas. Metropolitan areas are created by each state in Brazil. The data set includes the municipalities that belong to all metropolitan areas in the country according to state legislation in each year. Original data were generated by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE). Data at scale 1:250,000, using Geodetic reference system "SIRGAS2000" and CRS(4674).

Usage

read_metro_area(
  year,
  code_state = "all",
  simplified = TRUE,
  output = "sf",
  showProgress = TRUE,
  cache = TRUE,
  verbose = TRUE
)

Arguments

year	Numeric. Year of the data in YYYY format. It defaults to NULL and reads the data from the latest year available.
code_state	The two-digit code of a state or a two-letter uppercase abbreviation (e.g. 33 or "RJ"). If code_state="all" (the default), the function downloads all states.
simplified	Logic FALSE or TRUE, indicating whether the function should return the data set with 'original' spatial resolution or a data set with 'simplified' geometry. Defaults to TRUE. For spatial analysis and statistics users should set simplified = FALSE. Borders have been simplified by removing vertices of borders using ⁠st_simplify{sf}⁠ preserving topology with a dTolerance of 100.
output	String. Type of object returned by the function. Defaults to "sf", which loads the data into memory as an sf object. Alternatively, "duckdb" returns a lazy spatial table backed by DuckDB via the duckspatial package, and "arrow" returns an Arrow dataset. Both "duckdb" and "arrow" support out-of-memory processing of large data sets.
showProgress	Logical. Defaults to TRUE display progress bar.
cache	Logical. Whether the function should read the data cached locally, which is faster. Defaults to cache = TRUE. By default, geobr stores data files in a temporary directory that exists only within each R session. If cache = FALSE, the function will download the data again and overwrite the local file.
verbose	A logical. If TRUE (the default), the function prints informative messages and shows download progress bar. If FALSE, the function is silent.

Value

An ⁠"sf" "data.frame"⁠ OR an ArrowObject

Examples

# Read all official metropolitan areas for a given year
m <- read_metro_area(year = 1970)

m <- read_metro_area(
  year = 2024,
  code_state = "RJ"
  )

geobr documentation built on May 20, 2026, 5:08 p.m.