The short answer
The Castle Map atlas maps 711 landmarks in Germany: 254 castles, 34 fortresses, 256 palaces & châteaux and 167 ruins — each with a photo, its story and a page of its own.
Wikidata, the open database this atlas is built from, holds 20,589 items in Germany that are a castle, fortress, fort, château, palace, citadel or fortification of any kind — from a royal residence to a single surviving tower.
Figures published elsewhere often run higher still, because they count vanished sites and every surviving fragment of wall.
What a published source says
about 25,000 castle sites, standing or not — the German Wikipedia article “Burg”.
Why the numbers differ
What counts as a castle. A hilltop ruin, a fortified manor, a Baroque palace and a 19th-century folly are all “castles” in ordinary speech, and every count draws that line somewhere different.
Standing or vanished. Most fortifications ever raised are gone. A count of sites is a multiple of a count of buildings you can walk into.
Who did the counting. A national heritage register, an enthusiast’s database and an open dataset each stop at a different threshold of evidence.
What this atlas counts
584 of the 711 carry a sourced founding date. They run from c. 350 BC to 1941.
See them all on the map of castles in Germany →