The atlas

About the Castle Map

A free interactive night map of the world's great castles, fortresses and palaces — 2,400 landmarks across 131 countries, each with its photo, founding century and story. No ads, no accounts.

How it is made

Everything on this map comes from open data: facts, coordinates and founding dates from Wikidata, photographs from Wikimedia Commons, stories from Wikipedia, and the night basemap from OpenFreeMap and Natural Earth. The atlas is curated, not exhaustive: the 2,400 most significant landmarks worldwide, ordered by a fame ranking that blends Wikipedia coverage with real readership.

Missing a castle, or spotted a wrong date? The best route is improving its Wikidata entry — well-documented sites join the atlas at the next refresh, and the correction helps everyone else who uses the same open data.

Who keeps it

The atlas is run by one person, building in the open — AI does much of the heavy lifting, a human decides what ships. Every user-visible change lands in the changelog (with an Atom feed).

Everything is open

The full dataset is free to download (GeoJSON and CSV, CC0, citable via DOI). The statistics page computes it through, an MCP server answers live queries from AI assistants, and the map itself is free to embed.

Sister atlases from the same workshop: TrainRouter, Sunshine Atlas, Beachmap and Detourmap.