The Schauder fixed point theorem in geodesic spaces

We give a direct proof of Schauder's fixed point theorem in the setting of geodesic metric spaces, generalizing the classical Schauder's theorem and improving a recent version of this theorem in CAT(κ)$\mathrm{CAT}(\kappa )$ spaces. As an application we prove an existence result for a variational inequality in the setting of CAT(κ)$\mathrm{CAT}(\kappa )$ spaces.