Unable to install geopandas on python3.9 on macOS Big Sur - python-3.x

Question

I am trying to install geopandas on the machine described above.
This is what I am doing the error I get:
sudo pip3 install geopandas
Collecting geopandas
Downloading geopandas-0.8.1-py2.py3-none-any.whl (962 kB)
|████████████████████████████████| 962 kB 5.0 MB/s
Collecting fiona
Downloading Fiona-1.8.18.tar.gz (1.3 MB)
|████████████████████████████████| 1.3 MB 4.8 MB/s
ERROR: Command errored out with exit status 1:
command: /usr/local/opt/python#3.9/bin/python3.9 -c 'import sys, setuptools, tokenize; sys.argv[0] = '"'"'/private/tmp/pip-install-fbu0u179/fiona/setup.py'"'"'; __file__='"'"'/private/tmp/pip-install-fbu0u179/fiona/setup.py'"'"';f=getattr(tokenize, '"'"'open'"'"', open)(__file__);code=f.read().replace('"'"'\r\n'"'"', '"'"'\n'"'"');f.close();exec(compile(code, __file__, '"'"'exec'"'"'))' egg_info --egg-base /private/tmp/pip-pip-egg-info-knmlby9t
cwd: /private/tmp/pip-install-fbu0u179/fiona/
Complete output (2 lines):
Failed to get options via gdal-config: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: 'gdal-config'
A GDAL API version must be specified. Provide a path to gdal-config using a GDAL_CONFIG environment variable or use a GDAL_VERSION environment variable.
----------------------------------------
ERROR: Command errored out with exit status 1: python setup.py egg_info Check the logs for full command output.

Answer 1

GDAL is a required library for Geopandas and it needs to be built and compiled on your system and in your path before you pip install geopandas
If you are using homebrew, you can install it with
brew install gdal
and verify the installation by running
gdal-config --version
One note is that Gdal has a lot of dependencies and will take a bit to install. Using homebrew, it worked for me in one shot but it will likely upgrade a number of prerequisites including GCC and perhaps even python itself.
I should note that this worked for me on Catalina. If you are an M1 Mac with Big Sur every tool in this chain may not be upgradeable to native M1 code at this time and you may need some of the workarounds at How to run the Homebrew installer under Rosetta 2 on M1 Macbook