Changelog

What’s new on Castle Map

A small atlas, kept honestly: every user-visible change lands here, newest first. It is run by one person building in the open: AI does much of the heavy lifting, a human decides what ships. Corrections are welcome.

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Spotted an error? ceoflightmussy@gmail.com

12 October 2026: A strip for a partner at the top of every page, and a smaller welcome card

• A strip for a partner at the top of every page. Every page of the atlas now opens with a strip across its whole width: the photograph of Hohenwerfen Castle from the map’s welcome card under a dark tint, the words Your brand here, and a sentence saying what it is for. Castle Map is free and independent, and we are looking for one partner to support it, with full exclusivity: their brand alone, on every page and on the map. A line under it says the advertising is never invasive and that each partnership is tailored with care to both the readers’ experience and the partner’s wishes. Learn more leads to Flightmussy Studio, and so does a press anywhere else on the strip. The strip stands outside each page’s own text, so it changes nothing a search engine reads as the page’s content, and its photograph names its author and its licence. The privacy notice carries no strip. It is the same on Movie Scene Map.
• Buy me a coffee moves from the map to the pages. The cat with the Buy me a coffee sign no longer visits the map. The sign and its cat now stand on the strip beside Learn more, at the same size, and the footer of every page still links the same page. This replaces the entries of 2 and 6 October.
• A smaller welcome card, once, a minute in. The partnership card on the map is now a third of its old height: the photograph on its left, the words and the studio’s button on its right. On a computer it stands in the map’s top right corner, level with the panel; on a phone it lies across the foot of the screen. It comes on every visit to the map, a minute in, and leaves by itself after ten seconds, while a thin line along its foot runs down with them. A press on the card keeps it until you close it with its X or the Escape key. Nothing you do with the map takes it away before its time, and on a phone it steps aside while a castle, the panel or the search is open, and comes back for the rest of its ten seconds. It still waits while you have a castle open, and it never comes on a map framed on another site. This replaces the entry of 10 October.
• More maps from the same creator. The About page and the list of all castles now show Movie Scene Map and World Train Map as cards, each with a picture of its map, under the heading More maps from the same creator and a sentence saying that Mr. Flightmussy, who makes Castle Map, makes and runs both at Flightmussy Studio. On the About page they take the place of a line of links. The About page no longer says no ads, beside a strip that offers advertising space.
• The map glides. Let go of the map while moving it and it now glides on at the speed you gave it and slows evenly, on a phone and on a computer. Before, it lost more than half of its speed the moment you let go, and stopped soon after.
• The header of every page, on a phone. It is two rows now, as on Movie Scene Map: the name of the site with the language button and the day and night switch on the first, the six links on their own below. The language button shows the flag of the edition you are reading; a tap opens the row of all eight flags under the links, and another closes it. Until now the links, the flags and the switch wrapped loosely over four rows. And the name in the header reads Castle Map again, with its space: every page had shown it as one word. Learn more on the partner strip now presses like the other buttons of the site, with a raised edge that nudges under a mouse and sinks when pressed.

10 October 2026: The welcome card waits a minute and a half

• Ninety seconds in, not at once. The welcome card no longer opens with the map. When you arrive at the map from somewhere else, or switch it to another language, the card now comes ninety seconds later. The seconds are seconds of the map on your screen: while it sits in a tab you are not looking at, the clock stands still. The entry of 3 October said the map opens with the card; this replaces that. It is the same on Movie Scene Map.
• Never onto what you are reading. If you have a castle open when the time comes, are using the search, or have the panel open on a phone, the card waits until you have closed it, and comes a moment after.
• An X instead of the teal button. Continue to the map is gone: a bold X on a solid round button in the top corner of the card, under the photograph, closes it, and so does the Escape key. The line under its heading, The first thing visitors to the map see, is gone too, since it no longer is.
• What stays as it was. The card still comes only on those arrivals, never on a reload, a step back or a link from the site’s own pages, and nothing is stored about it. Once it is there it stays for at least five seconds and then gives way as soon as you use the map; what you did with the map before it came does not count. The coffee cat still waits while the card is on the map, and at ninety seconds the card now comes before the cat’s two minutes.
• What it does not do. The ninety seconds belong to one visit of the map: leave it for one of the site’s pages before they are up and come back by a link, and the card does not come, because a link from the site’s own pages never opens it.

7 October 2026: Google Analytics removed, a search bar on phones, and the press at the foot of the About page

• Google Analytics is gone. From 8 September the pages loaded Google Analytics beside the site’s own counting; from today nothing on this site loads from Google, and the site sets no cookie of its own again. Visits are counted once, anonymously, on the site’s own server in the EU, as the privacy notice describes. The cookies Google set are not read by anything here; deleting this site’s cookies in your browser removes them.
• A search bar on phones. On a phone the castle search now has its own bar between the top bar and the three buttons, always in view. Until today it sat inside the panel behind the filters pill, where few people found it. The results drop over the buttons and the map as you type, and a tap anywhere else puts them away; the list keeps to the part of the screen the keyboard leaves and scrolls when it must, and the partnership card steps aside the moment you start a search. On a computer the search stays in the panel, as before.
• The search finds castles by where they are. The box on the map now answers a country, a region or a city as well as a name: Austria, Loire, Salzburg. A castle found this way shows its place under its name, and a city brings the castles within 40 kilometres of it, the famous ones first. Castles found by their name still come first.
• Featured in, at the foot of the About page and in colour. The logos of the publications that have written about the atlas have moved from the top of the About page to its end, under the text about how the map is made, so the page opens with the atlas itself. They now show in their own colours in both themes, on bone tiles, where they were drawn in one grey tone before, and every outlet shows its own logo: Hacker News has its orange back, Tildes its square, Wikidata its coloured bars, Stack Overflow its orange, and Time Out, TRAVELBOOK, Computer Hoy, Antena 3 CNN, Karapaia, MetaFilter, Microsiervos, CHIP, Newsweek, Jurnalul, Travel.gr, Menéame, 1440 and Tangle stand with their logos where their names stood in type. Five appearances of the last fortnight joined the list the same day, none of them asked for: Xataka, whose piece of 3 October on a 3D map of Spain’s castles names the atlas and links its Spanish edition, is on the wall with its logo; Dominik Holzer’s blog Burgenliebe and the newsletters Mapas Milhaud, No tan random and Double Maths First Thing are in the full list behind it.
• Flags, not emoji. Every country now carries its flag as a small picture, on the map’s cards, on the castle, country and city pages and in the statistics. Until today those were emoji flags, which Windows draws as two letters, and England, Scotland and Wales had no flag at all, only ENG, SCT and WLS. The share text of CastleGuessr uses plain letters instead of coloured squares, and no emoji is left anywhere on the site.
• One name: Castle Map. The page titles, the footer, the structured data and the texts wrote the name as one word, Castlemap, while the map, the About page and the press write Castle Map. Everything says Castle Map now.
• The pages sit in the middle. The reading column of every page is narrower and centred, so on a wide screen the text no longer hugs the left edge with an empty stretch before the facts. The facts stand beside the story from a window about 830 pixels wide, and on a phone a castle’s facts panel now comes right under the photograph, before the story, with the castles nearby after it; it stood below everything until today.
• Menus that close. The flag menu on a phone, on the map and in CastleGuessr, and the search’s result list now close on a press anywhere outside them or on the Escape key. They used to stay open until their own control was pressed again.
• Flightmussy Studio on the About page. Under Who keeps it the About page now says the atlas is made by one person, under the pseudonym Mr. Flightmussy, quotes his own words from X beside a photograph of his desk, and shows Flightmussy Studio’s mark with a link to studioflightmussy.com, in all eight languages.
• A shorter panel, and four buttons on one row. The two lines at the foot of the map’s panel, More maps and Follow on X, are gone from the panel; the same links stay in the footer of every page and on the About page. On a phone the About button has joined the other three on one row instead of standing alone under them, the row’s type is sized to the screen so every label keeps to one line, and the panel the sliders button opens shows the filters directly, without a Filters heading of its own to tap. In CastleGuessr on a phone the way back to the map is a button in the top bar now, not a line under the photograph, and the answer’s buttons are one colour, with Next castle the only teal one.
• The map no longer opens on Antarctica. On a phone the map opens on the inhabited world, from the coast of Brazil to India and from the far north down to 56° south, fitted under the buttons; before, the whole globe sat as a short strip in the middle of the screen with Antarctica its largest shape. On a computer the first screen starts ten degrees further north for the same reason. Zooming out still shows the whole world.

6 October 2026: The coffee cat visits: two minutes in, for half a minute, every ten minutes

• The cat visits. The cat with the Buy me a coffee sign no longer flies in as the map opens and stays at its foot. It now comes two minutes after the map has opened, is there for thirty seconds, and leaves the way it came: it turns round and pushes its sign back out to the left. Ten minutes after it has left it comes again, for thirty seconds again, and so on for as long as the map stays open. The entries of 2 October (it flies in when the map opens) and 3 October (it flies in once the welcome card has gone) are replaced by this clock, and the cat still never comes while the welcome card is on the map. The cat on Movie Scene Map keeps the same clock.
• Minutes of the map on your screen. While the map sits in a tab you are not looking at, the clock stands still, so the cat does not come and go unseen. It is not taken from under you either: if you are moving your pointer over the sign when the thirty seconds are up, the cat waits until the pointer has moved off or lain still for a few seconds, and if you followed the sign to Buy Me a Coffee, it is still there with its cup when you come back and leaves a few seconds later.
• What stays as it was. A press on the cat sends it away at once, and a cat sent away by hand does not come back until the map is loaded again. A gust still moves it, once in the middle of each visit. With reduced motion set in your browser the sign appears and disappears without flying. Nothing is stored about any of this: the clock is a timer in the page, and it starts again with every load.
• What it does not do. On a phone an open castle card still covers the sign, so a visit of the cat can pass behind it unseen. Whoever wants the page at another moment finds the same link at the foot of every page.

3 October 2026: A welcome card: the first screen of the map, offered to one partner

• A card when you arrive. When you arrive at the map it now opens with a card. It says that Flightmussy Studio is seeking an exclusive partner for Castle Map, and it is itself the thing on offer: the card a partner would have, with a photograph, a name, a line of their own and a message. No partner is in it yet, so the heading reads Your brand here and the photograph shows, as an example, Hohenwerfen Castle in Austria on its rock above the Salzach valley. The picture is most of the card; the words under it are short. It is the same card as on Movie Scene Map.
• Two buttons and nothing else to press. Continue to the map, in the site’s teal, takes the card away at once, and so does the Escape key. The other button opens the studio’s site in a new tab.
• When it opens. When you arrive at the map from somewhere else, a search engine, a link or the address bar, and when you switch the map to another language. It does not open when you reload, when you step back, when you come to the map from one of the site’s own pages or from CastleGuessr, when a link takes you to a castle, a country or an area of the map, or on the map other sites embed. Nothing is stored about it: the card reads only where you came from.
• Five seconds, then the map. It stays for at least five seconds once it has appeared. After that it also leaves by itself as soon as you press, drag or zoom the map, choose a castle, or open the panel on a phone; in its first five seconds the map can be used under it, and the card gives way when the five seconds are up. While the card is on the map the coffee banner waits, and the cat flies in once the card has gone.
• The photograph. Hohenwerfen castle by Arne Müseler, a Featured picture on Wikimedia Commons, under CC BY-SA 3.0 DE, credited on the card in the words the photographer asks for, with a link to the licence. It is served from this site, so the card asks nothing of Wikimedia. The card is in all eight languages.
• What it is and is not. It is the site offering its own first screen to a partner, in its own words. The site still loads nothing from an advertising network and sells nothing about its readers, and when a partner takes the card, the card will say whose it is.

2 October 2026: A flying cat with a coffee sign, and no more Donate button

• A coffee sign at the foot of the map. There is now a purple button that says Buy me a coffee, and a ginger cat tows it there the way a small plane tows a banner. The cat is Mr. Flightmussy. It flies in from the left when the map opens, a gust moves it now and then, it rolls when you press the button, and when you come back from the page the button opened it is holding a cup. At rest nothing moves, and with reduced motion set in your browser nothing moves at all. It is the same banner as on Movie Scene Map.
• Press the cat to send it away. It turns round and pushes its sign back out the way it came, so the map is left clear for anyone who would rather not have it there. Nothing is remembered: the cat is back the next time the map opens.
• Buy Me a Coffee instead of PayPal. The button opens the maker’s page on Buy Me a Coffee in a new tab, in German, French or Spanish on those three editions and in English on the other five, because those are the languages that site has. The words on the button are the same in all eight editions, because they are the name of the service. It takes cards, Apple Pay and Google Pay without an account. Nothing on this site loads from Buy Me a Coffee: the button is an ordinary link, so that company learns of a visit only when someone follows it. The privacy notice says so.
• The Donate button is gone. It stood at the foot of the About page since 27 September; the link at the foot of every page now leads to the same Buy Me a Coffee page where it led to PayPal. PayPal is no longer linked anywhere on the site.
• What it does not do. On a phone an open castle card covers the button until it is closed. And the cup means thank you for looking: the site cannot know whether anything was given, and it does not try to find out.

28 September 2026: The castle card ends in push buttons

• The castle card ends in two buttons. “Full story” in the site’s teal and “Wikipedia” in black, the way the place card on Movie Scene Map ends, in place of the two small links the card carried until now. The founding year stands beside the country, where the century stood, since the century only repeated it. The card you see while the pointer rests on a dot ends at the story sentence; the buttons come when you click the dot, and on a phone they stay in view at the foot of a card that scrolls. CastleGuessr’s answer is the same card, so “See it on the map” and “Share result” sit in the same row.

27 September 2026: 410 more landmarks, every photograph framed, and CastleGuessr in the map’s own clothes

• 410 more landmarks. Castles, fortresses, palaces and ruins in 31 countries, each one looked at before it went on the map: at least three Wikipedia editions and a photograph that shows the landmark well. Fort Teremba, filed under France until now, stands under New Caledonia, the atlas’s 155th country. The atlas holds 9,079 landmarks.
• Every photograph framed for the screen it is on. The card on the map, the page and CastleGuessr each show a photograph in a shape of their own, and on a phone or a wide screen the crop could cut through a tower. All 9,079 photographs now carry the box where their landmark stands, measured photograph by photograph, and every crop keeps that box in view, on a phone and on a computer.
• A real photograph for every landmark. 201 photographs were replaced, many of them drawings, maps and old prints. Where the castle itself is gone, the card shows the place as it is today and says so: “The site today”, on 249 landmarks.
• CastleGuessr, redesigned on the computer and on the phone. The game wears the map’s own furniture now instead of a scoreboard of its own: on a computer the map’s panel, with the night-and-day switch and the eight languages; on a phone the map’s top bar. The answer is the castle’s card from the map, the score is a line of text, and the castle on the board is its category’s dot. A tap opens the photograph full size. The points are the same as before, up to 5,000 a round.
• A smoother map on phones. The map draws at no more than twice the screen’s resolution. On a phone with a three-times screen, panning missed its frame 73 times in a test and misses it 3 times now; zooming went from 32 missed frames to 8. Computers are unchanged.
• The card’s photograph arrives sooner. The map asks for a castle’s photograph while the pointer is still on its way to the dot, and a finger touching a dot asks for it before the card opens; a photograph the pointer has turned away from stops downloading. With Data Saver on, or on a slow connection, nothing is fetched ahead.
• Two smaller things on the card. It shows a castle’s name in your language with the English one under it, as the pages always have, and a castle’s rank in its country is written in your language: every edition but Japanese and Polish had printed the English “in” before the country (“#21 in Німеччина”).
• Every landmark checked again. 109 founding years were corrected against the landmark’s own article: the Doge’s Palace was first built about 810, not in 1340; Bran Castle dates from 1377; Fort Wilkins carried the year it became a state park; two castles had the years 11 and 14 from typing slips in Wikidata. Fifteen names that were not names (“Old château”, “Castle and its Fortifications”, the museum inside a bastion) are the landmarks’ own now: Riggisberg Castle, Valangin Castle, Borj Belkari. Seven pins that sat away from their building are moved, and three landmarks stood in the wrong country. Eight pages told the story of another subject, because their English article is only a redirect (the Palazzo dei Conservatori’s leads to the Capitoline Hill); they tell their own now, from Italian, Polish, Ukrainian, Catalan, Spanish and Arabic. Three entries that are not landmarks leave the map, a guard post, a natural history museum and a crown territory, and the territory’s page leads to Drahim Castle, the ruin it was ruled from.
• Every photograph and its crop looked at once more. A second reading of all 9,079 photographs found the crop rule keeping the top of a tall landmark, which in the wide strip of a phone showed a spire on empty sky, the Omsk Fortress among them; the rule now cuts mostly from the bottom. 259 photographs were replaced after each was laid beside every other photograph of its landmark on Wikimedia Commons, 9 swaps from earlier passes were undone, Vivari Fortress among them, and three landmarks that wore another landmark’s photograph have their own again.
• Sharper photographs on the card on a phone. The card asked for the same 500 pixel photograph on every screen; on a phone, where it spans the screen at three device pixels to the pixel, that looked soft. It now asks for a photograph sized to its screen: 960 or 1,280 pixels wide on a phone or a high-resolution screen, 500 on an ordinary computer screen as before.
• The Donate button is on the About page. It stood in the map’s panel beside About; it is now a button at the foot of the About page, and the footer of every page keeps the link. The panel has four buttons: Browse, Surprise me, CastleGuessr and About.
• The map runs on MapLibre 6. The library that draws the map moved from version 5.24 to 6.11, which closes a critical security advisory in every 5.x, needs WebGL 2 (a browser with only WebGL 1 now sees a notice instead of a map) and starts its worker from a file of this site rather than from a blob. Every part of the map was checked on it: the dots, the relief, the card, the zoom, the night-and-day switch, CastleGuessr’s board, the phone and the embed.

26 September 2026: The note in the corner is gone

• The note in the corner of every page is gone. The Donate link stays in every footer and in the map panel, and the privacy notice says what became of the one value the note kept in your browser.

23 September 2026: Every landmark checked again: photographs, categories, founding years and what belongs on the map

• 645 photographs replaced, each by a photograph of the landmark itself. All 8,764 photographs were looked at on contact sheets. Where the card showed a map, a plan, a drawing, a print, a postcard, an old black-and-white photograph, a model, a sign, an interior, a detail, a night shot or a view of something else, the landmark’s own Wikipedia articles in every language, its Wikidata item and its Commons category were searched, and the best photograph was put beside the old one before it was taken. Where no photograph of the landmark exists, because it was demolished, drowned or survives only underground, the drawing stays: a drawing of the right castle beats a photograph of the wrong one. Kumma in Sudan, which showed the Cairo Citadel, now shows Lepsius’s view of 1849, because the fortress has been under Lake Nubia since the 1960s.
• Tall photographs cropped where the landmark is. The card, the page and the game all show a picture wider than it is tall, and a portrait photograph was cut to its middle, which on a tower is a stretch of wall. On 155 of them the top or the bottom is kept instead, chosen photograph by photograph; Neidpath Castle shows its battlements.
• 91 landmarks in the right category. 77 that were shown as standing are ruins, or sites whose castle has gone, by their article, their Wikidata item and their photograph. Twelve manor houses and hunting lodges filed as castles are palaces, Årsta among them, and the citadel of Târgu Mureș and the walls of Seville are fortresses.
• Founding years read again. 342 years were corrected after reading what the article says: a rebuilding, a restoration, a museum or a person had been taken for the founding, and a Latin inscription “1,700 years old” had been read as the year 1700 (Qasr Bshir is from about AD 300). 57 years that belonged to something else are gone. 827 landmarks that had no year are dated for the first time, from their Wikipedia articles in any language and only where the text says so, marked “c.” where it gives a century or a period. Landmarks with a year: 74% → 83%.
• What belongs on the map. 60 entries leave: nineteen that are not castles, fortresses, palaces or their ruins (two caravanserais, two temples, a coal mine, a shipyard, a snow castle rebuilt every winter, a Roman theatre, a poorhouse), six ancient towns, ten modern office buildings named palaces, five modern replicas, seventeen sites where nothing stands, and three group entries, such as the Fortifications of Vauban, whose members are each on the map. Thirty-two city gates that belong to walls or a fortress already on the map are folded into it, and their pages lead there: the seven gates of Jerusalem into the Walls of Jerusalem, six of Beijing’s into its city fortifications. Gates that stand alone, city walls, towers and twentieth-century forts stay. Three guides to the castles near a city had stood on those gates alone, for Nanjing, Langfang and Bani Suheila, and are withdrawn. The atlas holds 8,672 landmarks.
• Sealand has a page of its own. HM Fort Roughs, the sea fort of 1942 twelve kilometres off the coast of Suffolk where the self-declared Principality of Sealand has lived since 1967, was filed under England. It is now the one landmark of Sealand, the atlas’s 154th country, with a photograph of the fort in place of a thumbnail 280 pixels wide.

23 September 2026: The map on an iPhone, from the clock to the toolbar

• On an iPhone the map now runs on under the clock and under Safari’s toolbar. Safari draws its toolbar as glass over the page, and until now the strips at the top and the bottom of the screen held nothing but plain ground around the map; the map and CastleGuessr now reach both edges of the screen, the bottom one the way Movie Scene Map does. The panel, the zoom buttons, the credit and the castle card stay where they were, and the middle of the map is still the middle of what you can see.
• Smaller things for a touch screen. No grey flash on a tapped link or button, no zoom on a double tap, no bounce of the whole page, no scroll bar on a castle’s card, no telephone links made out of numbers, and the corner note keeps clear of the notch when the phone lies on its side.

22 September 2026: The map panel in Movie Scene Map’s shape

• The map panel is arranged like Movie Scene Map’s. The brand line with the night-and-day switch at its right, the count, the eight languages as a row of flags inside the panel (they were a pill in the top-right corner), the search box, and under it the buttons, all one size in every edition on one row; the panel takes the width they need. The three folds for landmark types, fame ranking and founding year are one Filters fold now, with a button that shows everything again while something is narrowed, and the line at the foot reads “More maps”. Same controls, same colours, same map. On a phone the top bar takes that site’s measures too, with the count under the brand.

20 September 2026: Ten write-ups and a newsletter join Featured in

• Featured in, updated. The Romanian wave of mid-September (Urban.ro, Newsweek România, Jurnalul, Playtech and three more), travel.gr, CHIP, a Portuguese blog and one newsletter join the About page: found, not pitched.

20 September 2026: 630 landmarks, looked at one by one; four countries reached; Romania read again

• 630 landmarks join the atlas, 8,135 → 8,764, each one looked at before it entered. Every Wikidata item in the castle, fort, château, palace, citadel, fortification, ksar, kasbah and dzong trees that had a photograph, coordinates, an article and five or more Wikipedia editions, and was not yet on the map, was a candidate: 2,954 of them. A first gate removed plans, prints, paintings, photographs from before 1950, bunkers, city gates, settlements and landforms. The 1,828 left were read one at a time on contact sheets, beside their Wikidata description, classes, heritage status, founding year and sixty-day readership, and what turned out to be a town palace, a hotel, a winery, a house museum, a motte, a hillfort, a fragment of wall or a part of a complex already on the map stayed out. Twenty-five photographs were replaced from the landmarks’ own Commons categories where the current one was small, old or of something else. France gains 149, Germany 113, Italy and India 41 each, Scotland 39, Belgium 28, Austria 22, Czechia 19, Croatia 18. Four countries appear for the first time: Honduras (the Fortaleza de San Fernando de Omoa), Saint Vincent and the Grenadines (Fort Charlotte), Senegal (Fort d’Estrées on Gorée) and Togo (Château Vial).
• Romania, after Jurnalul’s review. Diana Scarlat’s piece of 17 September said important sites were missing and that Transylvanian manors pass as castles. Both were right. Neamț Citadel is on the map now; the atlas had never found it because its English label on Wikidata has read “Bihor” since an anonymous edit in 2020. The Roman fort of Argamum joins it. The “Țepeș Castle” in Bucharest’s Carol Park, a water tower of 1906 built to look like the keep at Poenari, leaves. Feldioara’s photograph from around 1900 gives way to the restored fortress. And 22 country houses that carry the Hungarian label kastély are filed as palaces; six fortified ones, Bran, Huniade, Bonțida Bánffy, Lázár, Bethlen at Criș and Sükösd-Bethlen at Racoș, stay castles.
• Three that readers asked for. Mearns Castle in East Renfrewshire, named as missing on Mastodon in July; the castle of La Roche-en-Ardenne, asked for by email on 13 September; and the Sheremetev Castle at Yurino on the Volga, whose team wrote on 12 September. Twenty ruins whose articles say so in words the atlas’s rules did not read, and thirty-odd residences that English Wikipedia titles “Castle” because that is how it translates a château, a Schloss or a zámek, were filed by hand as well.

20 September 2026: A castle in the Corbières, and a fourth sister atlas

• The Château de Saint-Martin de Toques joins the atlas. Someone involved in preserving it asked by email. A hilltop castle of the 12th to 14th centuries above Bizanet, in the Aude, that watched the roads between Narbonne and the Corbières; a lord swore fealty for it to the viscount of Narbonne around 1020, and it has been listed as a monument historique since 1926. Its article calls it partly ruined, but parts of it have been restored since the 1990s, and it is filed as a castle. 8,135 landmarks now.
• On a phone, the map’s top bar now reads Castle Map. It used to stack the one-word name over a “World castle map” title.
• Destinations Map, the climate of 3,833 destinations month by month, joins the sister atlases beside World Train Map and Movie Scene Map, in the map panel, the footers and the About page.

13 September 2026: A faster map: hovering, pinning, and the first seconds

• Hovering or pinning a castle no longer makes the map catch. Each time the pointer crossed a dot, the map re-laid out all 8,134 of them to draw the highlight. The highlighted castle now sits in a small layer of its own while the others simply fade, and the dot under the pointer is found in a lookup table rather than by testing every circle on screen. The card no longer jumps when its photograph arrives, and it follows the pointer without the frosted-glass effect that made it stutter on slower machines.
• The map appears sooner. It used to wait for one large file before drawing a single dot. The part a dot needs, its position, type, year and fame, now arrives first, at a third of the size; the photographs, stories and article links follow a moment later, before you have hovered anything. CastleGuessr, which needs the photographs at once, loads both parts together as before.
• Framing a country on a wide screen no longer hides its westernmost castles under the panel. The frame was sized for the narrower panel of smaller screens.

12 September 2026: A castle search that behaves on phones, and a flag on the language button

• Searching on a phone no longer zooms the page. On an iPhone, tapping the castle search in the panel zoomed the whole map in, and it stayed zoomed after the keyboard had gone. The search box now uses a text size that phones leave alone, picking a result puts the keyboard and the panel away at once, and the results are easier to tap.
• On a phone, the language button now shows the flag of the language you are reading. It used to show a globe, and the list of flags it opens ran off the edge of the screen; the list now fits, in two rows of four, on the map and in CastleGuessr.

12 September 2026: The press, in logos, at the top of the About page

• The About page now opens with the press, as logos. Le Figaro, BILD, Ouest-France, Euronews, The Verge and the rest appear by their logos, taken from Wikimedia Commons where a free copy exists; outlets without one are set in type. The full list, with a link to every piece, sits one click below. Nineteen write-ups that had not been listed join it, among them Ouest-France, BILD, TRAVELBOOK and The Verge, and so do an r/MapPorn thread, the Wikidata Weekly Summary, weeklyOSM and Artribune’s PAX. As before, none of it was pitched or paid for.

11 September 2026: A way to support the atlas

• The atlas has a donate button. It is on the About page, a link to it sits in every page footer, and a small note offers it the first time you open the site, and again when you come back four hours or more later. It opens PayPal’s own donation page; nothing from PayPal loads on this site. The atlas stays free, with no ads and no accounts.
• The sister links in the map’s panel now match the footers. The beach atlas left them on 7 September; the panel kept it by mistake until now.

11 September 2026: Four landmarks readers asked for join the map, and Fort Conger leaves

• Three came by email from the people who look after them. A guide at Logne Castle in the province of Liège asked whether it could be added: the stronghold of the prince-abbots of Stavelot, built early in the 12th century on a rock spur above the Ourthe and destroyed in 1521, now on the map as a ruin. The team at Snov Palace in Belarus, the Rdułtowski family’s classical palace and landscape park, wrote the same week, and so did the family that owns the Château de Poudenas in Gascony, a 13th-century castle opened up with an Italianate gallery in the 17th. Each has one to three Wikipedia articles, below the bar the atlas sets for its country, so each is admitted by hand, as reader requests have been since July.
• The Solovetsky Monastery is on the map as a fortress. It turned back the Livonian Order and the Swedes in 1571, 1582 and 1611, and its walls of giant boulders were raised in 1584–94 on an island in the White Sea, but Wikidata files it as a monastery, a type none of the atlas’s castle queries reaches. u/Aprilprinces named it missing under an r/MapPorn map drawn from this dataset.
• Fort Conger has left. The same commenter pointed out that it was “a wooden house, not even with a military purpose”: the base the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition built on Ellesmere Island in 1881 for the first International Polar Year. Wikidata calls it a fort because its builders did; the atlas files a place by what it is.

7 September 2026: Puerto Rico gets its own page, the Capitolio of Caracas joins, three landmarks that were never castles leave, and three demolished ones are filed as ruins

• Puerto Rico is now its own country on the map. El Morro, Castillo San Cristóbal and La Fortaleza had shipped under the United States, which is what Wikidata says and not where a reader looks for them; the atlas already files Curaçao, Aruba, Gibraltar, the Channel Islands and the Faroes by where they stand, and now does the same here. Prompted by u/Vaqueroalazar, who asked under an r/MapPorn map drawn from this dataset whether the Caribbean had any.
• The Palacio Federal Legislativo in Caracas is on the map. The Capitolio of 1877 had been excluded as a working legislature, a rule the atlas does not in fact apply to Westminster, Christiansborg, the Palais Bourbon or the Palacio de las Cortes: the line is the building, not the tenant, and an 1877 palace with a gilded dome is a palace. The written rule now says so. u/lajarusmorois pointed out that Venezuela showed a single dot; the Spanish colonial forts he named sit below the atlas’s fame bar, and this one does not.
• Three landmarks that were never castles have left: the Lost Gardens of Heligan (a garden), the Roman Theatre of Jableh (a theatre) and the Castillo de San Telmo in Almería (a lighthouse of 1865). Each carries a castle type on Wikidata beside the type it really is; the articles decide.
• Three demolished landmarks are filed as ruins (Prudnik Castle, Fort Witsen and the Alcázar of the Caliphs in Córdoba), as the rule since August says a vanished landmark must be. Tambo Colorado, which two registries had filed differently, is a palace again, and a test now refuses a landmark pinned both ways. (Taplacken Castle, which Wikidata calls a destroyed building, stays a castle: families live in what survives of it.)
• Smaller things. Wisłoujście Fortress’s one-line description in the dataset no longer reads “Lighthouse in Poland”. The Alamo is founded in 1718 again: Wikidata carries a second founding date of the year 8 beside the real one, and the refresh had taken it. Seven country pages that had no social card of their own (Venezuela, Kuwait, Mongolia, Nigeria, Antigua and Barbuda, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Timor-Leste) have one. Three hub titles that overran what a search result shows were shortened in every edition. The World Beach Map link has left the footer. The machine-readable site description now says that the castle routes are English-only, which they are.

5 September 2026: One photograph in 8,126 had vanished from Wikimedia Commons; every picture is now checked there on each refresh and before each release

• The photograph of Argyrokastro Castle has been replaced. The file the atlas had shown was deleted from Wikimedia Commons on 2 September after a deletion request, and the page, its map card and its social card had been showing an empty frame where the castle should be. The picture now is the lead photograph of the castle’s own Wikipedia article.
• Every photograph is now checked against Commons. The atlas serves its pictures through its own cache, which keeps a file for thirty days: long enough that a file renamed or deleted on Commons would disappear from a page quietly, weeks later, with nothing on this side noticing. A new pass asks Commons about every file in use on every data refresh: a renamed file is followed to its new name, a deleted one is replaced from the landmark’s current Wikidata image or its article’s lead photograph, and a release is refused while any landmark’s picture is gone with nothing to put in its place. Its first full run over 8,126 files found exactly one missing: the one above. The server, for its part, now keeps serving the copy it holds when Commons reports a file gone, so a picture stays up while the record is repaired.
• 189 photo credits lost their Commons boilerplate. Files moved to Commons from a language Wikipedia carry the transfer log in their author field (“Original uploader was X at de.wikipedia”, “User X on sv.wikipedia”, “This image is a work by X (User:x). When reusing, please credit…”, “derivative work: Y”), and those sentences had been printed beside, or instead of, the photographer’s name. The credit now names the photographer; the file’s page, one click away, keeps the full provenance.
• Two small consistencies. Nine hand-picked photographs (Sigiriya, Fat Margaret, the Salón de Reinos and six more) were addressed with a literal parenthesis on the page and in the image sitemap but with “%28” on the social card; all three now spell the address the way Commons does. And a photograph Commons no longer has answers with a plain 404 instead of the server’s stock error page.

4 September 2026: Castle routes: 22 itineraries that put 415 castles in the order you would travel them, the country-count answers wired together, and one sitemap per kind of page

• A castle route is a new kind of page here, and there are 22 of them: /castles/routes/. A country page tells you where the castles are. A route tells you which ones, in what order and how far apart, because most of the great castle country in the world is a line rather than an area: a river whose towers were built to tax the traffic on it, a frontier two kingdoms fortified against each other, one king’s building programme, one order’s brick. 415 stops across 19 countries, each with its photograph, its founding century and its distance from the start of the route.
• Sixteen of the routes let geography choose their stops, and six name them. On the Rhine, the Moselle, the Aosta valley and thirteen others, every landmark in this atlas within a stated distance of the route’s line is a stop, ordered by how far along the line it sits: nobody picked the 27 castles of the Rhine gorge, the gorge did. Where the membership is itself the fact (Edward I’s eight Welsh castles, the six that Ludwig II of Bavaria built, bought or died in, the six Rajasthan hill forts UNESCO inscribed together), the stops are named instead, and the build refuses to run if the atlas has stopped holding one of them.
• Every distance on a route page is a straight line, and every route page says so. This atlas holds coordinates, not road geometry, so it cannot compute a driving distance and does not print one. Where a route runs through more castles than a page can usefully list, the page states how many it is a selection from (the Andalusian frontier holds 68 within 30 km of its line and shows the 30 best known) rather than trimming the list quietly.
• The answer pages for “how many castles are there in X?” now link each other. There are 48 of them, they answer the question a search engine is most often asked about a country’s castles, and each one had exactly two links pointing at it: the section’s own index, and a line at the very bottom of its country page, under the FAQ. Each now carries eight sibling answers, and the link from the country page has moved up to sit directly under the paragraph that says how many landmarks the atlas maps there, which is the sentence that makes a reader wonder whether that is all of them.
• The sitemap is now split by kind of page rather than by language. Search Console reports coverage per sitemap file, so the split decides what it can tell us: eight language files answered “how much of the German edition is indexed”, which nobody was asking, while the question that matters (which kind of page is stuck unindexed) needed a hand-typed query to answer. There is now one file for the country pages, one for the day-trip guides, one for the regions, one for the routes, one for the how-many answers and one per language for the landmark pages, which alone are too many for a single file.
• The routes are linked from the country pages they cross, from the regional maps that cover the same ground, and from every landmark page that is a stop on one, which also tells you where on the route that landmark falls. They are English only for now: their names are proper nouns whose translations have to be sourced rather than invented, and the atlas already has 30,000 pages waiting to be indexed without adding a new tier eight times over.

4 September 2026: Every photograph now served from the atlas’s own cache, 195 landmarks re-filed as palaces, ruins or fortresses, most of them outside Western Europe, nine Swiss names that were inventory descriptions, and five entries that were never castles

• The photographs on every page, card and game round are now served from this site’s own cache instead of straight from Wikimedia. The social-card images had gone that way since 26 August; the picture a reader actually sees still loaded from upload.wikimedia.org, so a Commons outage blanked every page at once, and a crawler walking the cards faster than the cache could fill was answered 429 by Wikimedia through the proxy. The cache holds every one of the 8,136 photographs now and refreshes them monthly. The pictures themselves did not change, so no page’s date moved for it.
• 56 “castles” are palaces. Forty-six of them are the Hungarian and Romanian country houses the English article titles call “Mansion” (kastély and conac, the unfortified seats of the Batthyány, Esterházy, Zichy, Teleki and Bethlen families), which had been filed as castles because they carry no English lead for the residence rule to read and the name rule knew “Palace” but not “Mansion”. The rest are residences whose own lead says so: Friedrichsfelde, Åkeshov, the Alter Hof in Munich, the hunting lodges of Augustusburg and Granitz, the Neues Schloss of Meersburg, Fiholm, the Château de Voltaire, the Château de la Barre and the Château de Seneffe.
• 31 landmarks are ruins. A sweep of every English lead and description for “ruins”, “remains of” and “archaeological site” on rows filed as standing buildings, each verdict read from the sentence itself: the Acropolis of Athens, Sacsayhuamán, Kuelap and Tambo Colorado; the Roman forts of Vindolanda, Hardknott, Arbeia, Isca Augusta, Blestium, Coria and Trimontium; Finlaggan, Melbourne, Sheffield, Spofforth and Olderfleet; the Daming Palace, Kaunas Fortress, Rokantiškės, Rūjiena, Galarsan-Gorarsan, Anevo, Runkel, the Wolfsburg, the Bulverket, Kudryntsi, Shalfak, Manegg, Huis ter Kleef, Nobeoka and the Round City of Baghdad. Standing, roofed or rebuilt sites the same sweep flagged stayed where they were: Carlisle, whose lead only mentions the ruins of Hadrian’s Wall; Nyköping, a museum; Shigatse Dzong, rebuilt in 2007; Ollantaytambo, a living town.
• A second sweep of the 3,900 landmarks outside Western Europe re-filed 108 more, because the rules had been written for Western words. The English lead of a Czech, Ukrainian, Baltic or Balkan castle rarely says “ruin”; its German, Ukrainian or Polish lead does, so this pass read those. 50 more ruins: Choustník, Cornštejn, Dívčí kámen, Gutštejn, Buben, Brníčko and Cimburk in Bohemia and Moravia; Bronka, Yaniv, Novomalyn, Visk, Laszki Murowane and Kotsiubyntsi in Ukraine; Koło, Iłża and Nowy Dwór in Poland; Piltene, Vecpiebalga, Karksi, Dubingiai and Kavilda in the Baltics; Rodoni, Prezë, Soko Grad, Vidoški, Visoki and Tilurium in the Balkans; Qal’eh Dokhtar, Skardu, Kayts Island, Halmyris, Storgosia, Ushiberd, the Cadmea of Thebes, Peel Castle, Fort Ino, Fort Tourgis; and five Japanese sites whose own lead calls them 城跡, castle ruins: Komoro, Katsuren, Ki, Kōfu and the Tsutsujigasaki residence. 33 castles are fortresses: the Spanish colonial castillos of Havana, Santiago de Cuba, Cienfuegos, San Juan, St Augustine, Lake Izabal and Valparaíso, the Brazilian fortalezas of Belém, Florianópolis, Paraná and Rio, the kasbahs of Cherarda, Boulaouane, Mehdia, Gnaouas, Amridil, Tifoultoute, Taourirt and Tamnougalt, Golubac, Château Pèlerin, Baghaberd, Trapessac, Đurđevac and Gyeongju’s walled town. 22 are palaces: the archbishop’s Kroměříž, Mikulov, Smolenice, Olyka, Dzików, Raudonė, Raudondvaris, Šlokenbeka, the Alcázar de Colón and a dozen Hungarian, Slovak and Romanian kastély and conac. Three go the other way, from fortress back to castle, because their leads say castle: Zilkale, Qal’at Najm and Qal’at Sukkara. One caution the sweep learned: Japanese Wikipedia opens every historical castle with “was located”, Osaka and Uwajima included, so that wording is not a ruin and was not read as one.
• Nine Swiss landmarks had a heritage register’s description of the property as their name. “Château with two outbuildings, farmhouse, horticultural outbuilding, rural, two pavilions, pond, and two fountains” is the Château de Crans; “Castle with riding hall, house, outbuildings, fountain, and choir of the old church” is Mathod Castle. The cantonal inventory’s line had been pasted into Wikidata as the English label, and the 2 September intake took it at face value. All nine now carry the name their article uses (Mathod, D’En-Bas, Crans, Barberêche, Grand-Vivy, Waldegg, Heidegg, Wolfsberg and Blonay), their addresses unchanged, and the name fetchers now refuse a label that enumerates outbuildings with commas.
• Five entries were never castles and are gone: the Casa del Fascio in Como, Terragni’s 1932 party headquarters, which reached the atlas through a “palazzo” typing; Château Léoville-Poyferré, a Saint-Julien winery; the Stobnica “castle”, a building site on an artificial island since 2018; the Khanderao Market in Vadodara, a market hall; and the fairy-tale castle of the Taman Mini theme park in Jakarta. 8,133 landmarks. With that replica gone, the “castles near Jakarta” guide, which only it had made eligible, is retired too. The Karabakh fortress that had shipped under its German article title, Dschraberd, is Jraberd.
• Six founding years were reconciled with the fetcher’s own hand corrections, which the pages had not yet taken: Arsuf, Raigad, the Bistrik kula and Ziwiyeh no longer show an excavation or designation year as a founding date, while Brimstone Hill keeps 1690 and Fort St. Joseph 1799, the sourced dates that a blanket correction would otherwise have thrown away with the wrong ones.
• The Japanese edition’s shortest search descriptions gained a sentence. A landmark with no district, no city within reach and no dated neighbour was described in 39 characters (“アーグラ城塞 — 16世紀の要塞（インド）。写真・基本情報・地図上の位置。”), which Bing’s report counted as too short on some four hundred pages. Those pages, and only those, now also state the landmark’s fame rank in its country, the same fact the longer descriptions already carried.

2 September 2026: 353 landmarks the atlas’s own bar admits and its queries could not see: Sigiriya, Mycenae, Knossos, the dzongs of Bhutan, the walls of Tallinn and Seoul, and seven countries on the map for the first time

• The question was not which castles exist but which clear this atlas’s own bar and never arrived. Every landmark here needs a photograph, exact coordinates and a Wikipedia article, and enters by the number of language editions that write about it. Three audits ran the same day: every item in Wikidata’s castle, fortress, palace, citadel and fortification classes with eight or more editions, diffed against the map; the classes those queries never reach (dzong, kasbah, ksar, kremlin, hillfort, city walls, Roman fort, and the whole World Heritage list); and a walk of the English Wikipedia category trees for castles, fortresses, forts and palaces by country, 22,220 articles, which sees a landmark whatever Wikidata calls it. The bar for what went in was the map’s own: eight editions anywhere, five to seven only where a country was thinly covered.
• The famous tier was nearly complete, and the holes in it were single names. Above twelve editions the castle, fort and château classes had nothing missing at all. What the class queries could not see was typed as something else: Sigiriya is a “human settlement” to Wikidata (57 editions, World Heritage); Mycenae (83 editions, the Lion Gate), Knossos, Tiryns and Phaistos are “ancient cities”; Madinat al-Zahra an archaeological site; Brimstone Hill a national park; the Kraków Barbican a barbican; Pavlovsk Palace an architectural landmark; Samuel’s Fortress in Ohrid an archaeological site, in a country that until today carried one landmark.
• Bhutan goes from two landmarks to fourteen. Its dzongs, the fortress-monasteries that define the country, are all typed “dzong in Tibet” on Wikidata, a class no query of this atlas reached: Punakha, Rinpung, Simtokha, Trongsa, Jakar, Gasa, Lhuentse, Trashigang, Dobji, Lingzhi, Wangdue Phodrang and the ruined Drukgyal, plus Shigatse’s across the border.
• City walls, which the atlas already carried for Dubrovnik, Ávila and Constantinople, now include Tallinn, Seoul, Thessaloniki, Nuremberg, Heraklion, Nicosia, Chania and Senglea, and the fortified gates and towers that survive as a city’s last fortification stand on their own: Michael’s Gate in Bratislava, St Florian’s Gate in Kraków, the three Fatimid gates of Cairo, Munich’s Isartor, Sendlinger Tor and Karlstor, Lübeck’s Burgtor, the Sassenpoort, the Germans’ Gate of Metz, Fat Margaret, the Lotrščak Tower, the Tower of Kamianiec. Components of a landmark already on the map, the gates of Rome’s Aurelian Walls or the Kremlin’s towers, were left out on purpose.
• North Africa and the Sahel of the map: the kasbahs of Le Kef, Béja, Sfax, Beni Mellal, Chefchaouen, Amridil and Tifoultoute, Kasbah An-Nouar in Fez, the ksour of Ouled Soltane, Tizourgane and Nalut, the ribats of Monastir and Sousse, Kelibia Fort, the Dey’s palace and four Moorish palaces of the Casbah of Algiers, Ahmed Bey’s palace in Constantine, and eleven palaces of the medina of Tunis. Tunisia doubles, Algeria and Morocco grow by a third.
• The ancient and the earthen: the Roman forts of Saalburg, Diana, Lambaesis, Burgh Castle, Capidava, Betthorus, Gerulata, Celemantia, Porolissum and Sucidava; the hillforts and castros of Heuneburg, Titelberg, Havránok, Levý Hradec, Varbola, Valjala, Briteiros, Zambujal, Terroso and Sanfins; the Viking ring fortresses of Fyrkat and Trelleborg beside Aggersborg; the Urartian Teishebaini; the Bronze Age citadels of Midea and Abuli; the Khorezmian fortresses Ayaz-Kala, Akchakhan-Kala and Kafir-kala.
• Seven countries appear on the map for the first time: Saint Kitts and Nevis (Brimstone Hill), Antigua and Barbuda (Fort Berkeley), Nigeria (the Royal Palace of the Oba of Benin), Kuwait (Seif Palace), Mongolia (Sangiin Kherem), Timor-Leste (the Palácio de Lahane) and Venezuela (Castillo Solano). Thinly covered ones fill in: Pakistan +10, Malta +10, Bosnia, Slovenia, Finland, Norway, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Afghanistan, Kosovo, Uzbekistan and Yemen among them.
• What was deliberately not taken. Britain holds some three hundred castles at five to seven editions that this pass could see and did not add, because they are not a hole in the queries but a matter of where England, Scotland and Wales set their floor; and thirty Venetian palazzi at exactly eight editions, since every house on the Grand Canal has a stub in eight languages. Anything whose only depiction is a map, a model, a drawing or a nineteenth-century print stayed out. The new entries are, on average, less read than the map’s median; the fame ranking places them honestly.
• Thirty-eight of the new entries needed their category pinned by hand, because a dzong is a monastery to Wikidata, a Maltese watchtower is a “tower” and Villa di Castello reads as a castle by its name; fourteen photographs were replaced where Wikidata’s was an etching, a print, a neighbour or a thumbnail; and sixteen landmarks whose Wikidata country is a historical state (the Austrian Empire for Ternopil, Ancient Rome for Sanfins) are filed where they stand. The decision record, including everything rejected and why, is in press/audits/intake-2026-09-02.md.

1 September 2026: A second audit: founding years reconciled with Wikidata, 227 Japanese descriptions restored, photographers credited by name, and the sister atlases renamed

• 82 founding years corrected, three of them classes of error rather than single mistakes. Wikidata counts BC years without a year zero but exports them with one, so every precisely dated BC landmark on the atlas was a year late: the Ishtar Gate read 574 BC, Erebuni 781 BC, the Royal Palace of Mari 1799 BC; ten put right. Where Wikidata holds several dates the atlas had kept whichever came first, so Ca’ d’Oro was “founded” in 1927 (its museum) and the Château de Chantilly in 1882 (its rebuild); it now takes the earliest date of century precision or better, 59 landmarks. And a “2nd millennium” had been shipping as “c. 2000” on medieval ruins like Kamenica Castle; a millennium is no longer a date, so four are honestly undated and two moved to their real century. Nine more were read against their own leads by hand: Fort Clatsop is 1805, not its 1955 replica; Kernavė is first mentioned in 1279, not the 1989 reserve; the Castillo de Mequinenza is 14th-century, not its 1959 restoration.
• The Prešov Castle Road is gone from the atlas. Wikidata types it as a castle; it is a 2011 hiking trail linking six castles near Prešov, and it had a page saying it was founded in 2011. 7,785 landmarks.
• Seven landmarks with no Latin-script name anywhere in Wikidata now have an English one: Nevel Fortress, Sebezh Fortress, Poltava Fortress, Chorgun Isar, the Castle of Ochia, Al-Dosariyah Castle and Shaar Castle. Their English pages had been titled in Cyrillic, Greek or Arabic.
• Photographers are credited by name, not by address. The credit line under a photo (and the photographer field in each page’s structured data) carried whatever Commons’ author field held, and for 350 photographs that was a forum thread, a footnote marker, a talk-page signature with its timestamp, “The original uploader was …”, or in three cases a private e-mail address. The name stays; the rest is gone.
• 227 Japanese castle pages had a search description that was only the landmark’s name and an ellipsis: “アテナイのアクロポリス…” for the Acropolis. Japanese leads open with a long parenthetical gloss in full-width brackets, which the description builder stripped only in the ASCII form. Restored; the guard now knows both.
• The seven translated changelog pages carried a literal placeholder where their modified date belonged: an invalid date in their structured data since 30 August. They take the English page’s date, and a new check walks every page outside the sitemap for the same class.
• 26 English stories opened with “(, Spanish:” (the hollow a dropped pronunciation template leaves, the Alhambra’s among them). Cleaned wherever a story is rendered.
• The sister atlases in every footer: FilmMap became Movie Scene Map at moviescenemap.com, and World Beach Map takes Detourmap’s place. The guard that catches a stale sister link now knows all three moves.

30 August 2026: A site-wide audit, and what it found: readership counts, founding years, photos search engines could not see, and a search box that ignored lowercase Cyrillic

• The Great Wall of China had 12,116 Wikipedia readers a month on this atlas and ranked #171 for fame; it has 467,136 and is the most-read landmark on the map. One request in its 193-edition readership sum had failed and the partial total was written as if it were final; the same fault had Machu Picchu at a quarter of its readership. Both are refetched, and a failed edition can no longer overwrite a real total. Eighteen founding years that were really a restoration, a designation or an excavation date are corrected from each landmark’s own article (Castillo de Matrera is 9th-century, not 2015; Fort Mose 1738, not 1994), and Udine Castle, which the atlas had published as the oldest castle in the world at c. 2300 BC, is dated 983: the earlier figure had been read off a sentence comparing its hill to Silbury Hill in England. 770 dates that Wikidata records only to the century, decade or millennium now say so with a “c.”, and Kakunodate, Gloucester and Redoubt Kali, all demolished, are filed as ruins.
• Every photograph now loads straight from Wikimedia’s image servers. The old address went through two redirects on every page and sat under a path that Wikimedia asks image crawlers not to fetch, so in a month of coverage not one castle photo could enter Google or Bing image search; the image sitemap, the hero pictures and the structured data all point at the direct file now. Thirty-one pages carried wiki source in their summaries (“[cita requerida]”, “[[.]]”, one Ukrainian story that opened with template code): cleaned, and the cleaner runs on every future fetch. Six Japanese map cards that showed only a landmark’s name have their sentence. The line that said a landmark was “older than 100 % of the atlas” is capped at 99, and the French, Spanish, Polish and German founding clauses no longer assume every landmark is masculine (or, in German, neuter).
• On the map: the Ukrainian search box found nothing for a lowercase query: 2,055 landmarks carry a Cyrillic name and none of them could be typed the way people type; Cyrillic and Japanese searches are case-folded now. Framing a country from a castle page no longer shows the whole planet for France or the Netherlands (their overseas landmarks had stretched the box to 227° of longitude); phones can finally zoom out to the whole world; “Surprise me” honours the filters instead of pinning a castle with no dot under it; a failed data load shows a message and two links instead of a blank page; and on phones the hint strip at the foot of the map folds behind a small ⓘ button. CastleGuessr can be played with a keyboard (arrows pan, Enter drops the pin at the crosshair), says so when a browser has no WebGL, and draws the reveal line the short way round the world.
• The hint strip is gone from the map, on every screen, and phones no longer end in a black band. The bottom line of tips and the open-data credit that sat over the map (and, on phones, behind a second ⓘ next to the map’s own) has been removed; the provenance stays on the About and Data pages, and the map’s single ⓘ is the tile attribution, nothing else, now dressed in the same glass as the zoom control in both themes, where it used to open as a white box on the night chart. And the page’s root canvas follows the theme: iOS 26 paints the strip behind Safari’s glass bars from that canvas, which was fixed at night even in day mode, so a parchment map ended in a black bar.
• Iran and the Middle East, read for ruins. All 409 landmarks of the region that were filed as standing were checked against their Wikidata class and state of conservation, their own article and its infobox. Thirty-four are ruins and are filed as such now: the Bam Citadel, almost completely destroyed by the 2003 earthquake; Margat, whose own infobox reads “Ruin, under renovation”; the Roman forts of the Kharga oasis (Qasr al-Gibb, Qasr el-Labakha, Ain Umm el-Dabadib, Qasr Dush) and Shali, the collapsed mud-brick town of Siwa; Aniba, under Lake Nasser since the 1960s; the Citadel of Ghazni, more than half of whose towers have fallen; Kızkalesi, Lampron, Samsun Castle, demolished a century ago; and eleven Iranian castles (Ray, Narin, Nehbandan, Behestan, Firuzkuh, Ostanavand, the Portuguese fort on Qeshm, the Abu-Nasr and Kangavar sites and the Atashgah of Isfahan) of which, in the words of their own articles, not much remains.
• For search engines and other machines: breadcrumbs on the seven translated editions now start at their own homepage rather than the English one; every page declares its Open Graph locale; the translated changelogs, which are mostly the English entries, point their canonical at the English page; a country page for Northern Cyprus no longer carries Cyprus’s title in six editions; social cards use the country card where the photograph is too small for one; the open-data page documents all eighteen columns, including the photographer and licence fields most Commons licences require; the web-app manifest, llms.txt and robots.txt derive their counts from the dataset at build time, so none can fall a release behind again (the manifest had said 3,708 castles); and the game’s copy no longer claims to hide the castle’s name: it has shown it since the game went pin-only on 5 August.

28 August 2026: Castlemap now reads in Ukrainian: the eighth language edition

• Every page of the atlas now exists in Ukrainian at /uk/: the interactive map, all castle pages, the 141 country pages, the day-trip guides, the rankings, the statistics and the game. Country names decline the way Ukrainian needs them to (в Україні, у Франції, на Мальті), centuries read XIII століття, and the 182 Ukrainian landmarks (Kamianets-Podilskyi, Khotyn, Palanok, Pidhirtsi, the Crimean fortresses) are described from their own Wikipedia.
• 1,948 landmarks carry their Ukrainian Wikipedia story, the name that edition uses, and the rest are translated from English and marked as such, the same arrangement as the other six editions. The Ukrainian edition was built the way Polish and Dutch were: the chrome and the computed prose are a first pass pending a native-speaker review, and the edition says so at the foot of every page until its stories are fully translated.

28 August 2026: Three Lyon forts that no longer stand were on the map as fortresses. They are ruins now, and 156 others with them

• A landmark that is no longer there is filed as a ruin. Checking the Lyon intake of two days ago, three of its forts turned out to have been demolished: Fort de Caluire in 1933 for the Henri-Cochet stadium, Fort de la Duchère in the 1960s for a sports complex, and Fort de Montessuy, of which a few scarps and a stone “dame” remain. All three shipped as standing fortresses. They are ruins now, which is what the atlas calls every site that was demolished and never rebuilt.
• One hundred and fifty-six more, found by asking the same question of every landmark. Six of the French entries that arrived on 26 August are called ruined in their own articles (Couzan, Fallavier, Albon, Cordon, Mornas, Chamelet), and had been filed as castles because the ruin pass was not re-run after the intake. A sweep of Wikidata’s condition statements over all 6,269 non-ruins then gave 186 candidates; 17 whose own lead says the building is gone or a ruin were re-filed, among them Baynard’s Castle in London, the Hôtel Saint-Pol in Paris, Tervuren Castle and Fort Macquarie, where the Sydney Opera House stands. The 161 the lead could not settle were then read one by one against their own Wikipedia infoboxes, categories and home-language articles. 133 more are ruins now: Bodiam, Chepstow, Threave, Carreg Cennen, Gisors and Edo Castle among them, and with them sites where nothing stands at all, such as Fort Amsterdam under the Custom House and the Temple in Paris. 25 stand and stay what they are: Wikidata recorded their destruction and forgot the rebuilding, as at the Berlin Palace, the City Palace of Potsdam and the Munich Residenz, or the repair, as at Gaziantep Castle after the 2023 earthquake; each is pinned so no rule can ever file it as a ruin. Two were never landmarks and are gone from the map: the V-3 cannon, a weapon whose pin sat on the Fortress of Mimoyecques, which takes its place, and Carteia, a Phoenician and Roman town.
• Five photographs showed something else. Eilean Donan Castle was illustrated with Kilchurn Castle: Wikidata lists three pictures for it and the atlas had taken the wrong one. Château de Brissac showed a 2025 festival mosaic, Carbisdale Castle its entrance corridor, Glenveagh Castle the glen rather than the castle, and Perdana Putra two heads of government admiring the view from it. Each has its own picture now, and where Wikidata offers several the atlas prefers the one whose file names the landmark.

26 August 2026: Lyon had seven castles on the map and the Loire had forty-four. Two readers said so, and 51 landmarks followed

• “Why so many french castle do not appear? For example, near Lyon there are a lot, but nothing on the map!” @DeRicaudy wrote that on X, adding that his own corner (the Beaujolais) has dozens. A month earlier @giribot had said the same on Bluesky and named two: Mornas and the Fort de Bouc. The way to settle it was to measure density rather than argue: within 70 km of Paris the atlas had 62 landmarks, of Tours 44, of Colmar 43, and of Lyon, seven. The Beaujolais had none at all.
• Fifty-one landmarks joined, and the region now looks like the rest of France. Within 70 km of Lyon: 7 → 52. In the Beaujolais: 0 → 17, among them Jarnioux (the castle in the photograph he posted) with Montmelas, La Chaize, Pizay, Bagnols, Vaurenard, Arginy and the rest of the tourist board’s own list. Lyon’s ring of nineteenth-century forts came too: Vancia, Bron, Bruissin, Loyasse, Caluire, Montessuy, la Duchère. And the two named on Bluesky: the Forteresse de Mornas and the Fort de Bouc.
• Why the map could not have fixed this by itself. France is one of the deepest pools in the atlas, so its fame ranking cut high: every one of its previous 469 entries had at least five Wikipedia editions behind it. The castles around Lyon are documented mostly in French alone and sit at three or four, so no amount of ranking would ever have reached them. They were added by hand instead, each one checked to be a fortification by its Wikidata type rather than by its name, which is why the Roman amphitheatre and odeon of Lyon, the aqueduct of the Gier and a farming school in a château came back in the same search and are not here.
• Australia was checked too, and the honest answer is different. After Time Out Australia sent readers to the country page, it looked thin at ten. It turns out the entire pool of Australian fortifications on Wikidata that have a photograph, exact coordinates and articles in two languages is fifteen, and the atlas already had eight of them. The four that qualified joined (Bradleys Head, Princess Royal Fortress, Fort Banks and Fort Cowan Cowan), and Australia now stands at fourteen. It is a small number because Australia has few castles, not because the atlas was ignoring them.
• Every photograph on the atlas now names its photographer. 744 pictures were showing only “Photo · Wikimedia Commons”; each one now carries the name and the licence, which is what most of those licences ask for in return.
• Three fortresses that were standing on top of something else. Kaunas Fortress had been given Kaunas Castle’s coordinates, though the castle is fourteenth-century and the fortress is an 1882 ring around the whole city; the Fortified Position of Namur sat on Fort de Malonne, one of its nine forts; and the Fortress of Mainz sat on its own citadel. Each is now placed at the centre of its own documented forts, which is where the ring actually is.

26 August 2026: Every castle page now shows its photograph when shared on Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, plus a copy fix a reader was right about

• Shares on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger had no picture, for every castle page, for a month. The social-card image pointed at Wikimedia Commons, and Commons answers Meta’s scraper with a refusal; Twitter, Slack, Discord and Mastodon fetch it fine, which is why nobody noticed. Meta’s own debugger confirmed it: two scrapes of the Versailles page built no image at all. Each page now serves its photograph from this site, with its real pixel size declared, so the first share of any URL carries the picture. (Found in a site audit; the same defect had been fixed on the sister film atlas four days earlier.)
• “The name says castles, the title says castles and fortresses, the description says castles, fortresses and palaces, and there are four categories.” Carlos Montero said it on Bluesky, and he was right: 1,518 of the landmarks are ruins, a fifth of the atlas, and the about page, the data page, the rankings and every country page introduced the atlas as three kinds of building. They now say four, in all seven editions.
• Two dots that were one place, and two places that were one dot. Mangup, the cave city in Crimea, was on the map twice (Wikidata keeps a second record for its fortifications, at the same coordinate), and so was Villegagnon Island in Rio, where the 1555 Fort Coligny and the Portuguese fortress that later replaced it shared one point; each place has one pin now. The reverse: Kraton Kanoman in Cirebon and the neighbouring Kasepuhan palace sat on top of each other, as did the Törley and Sacelláry mansions in Budafok, because Wikidata gives each pair a single coordinate. Both now stand where they stand.
• Trapezitsa no longer dates from 4000 BC. The fortress above Veliko Tarnovo was listed as the oldest thing in Bulgaria because its article opens with the Chalcolithic settlement on the hill; the fortress itself is 12th-century, and the page says so. Three demolished buildings that were drawn as standing (Antrim Castle, Slot Heemstede and Ludlow Castle in Delhi) are marked as ruins, and the Royal Palace of Bucharest got a new photograph after its old one was deleted from Commons.

22 August 2026: Jaén had nine castles on the map. Spanish readers noticed, and 645 landmarks across 57 countries followed

• “Jaén, la mayor concentración de castillos de Europa, solo salgan nueve, vaya timo.” Marcos, commenting on 20minutos’ article about the atlas, counted right: the province had nine. The reason was not a missing castle but a rule, the atlas admitted landmarks in national fame order, and in that race Jaén’s castles lost every slot to Catalonia’s. The whole admissible tier of the province was read, castle by castle, and twenty joined: Segura de la Sierra, seat of the Order of Santiago; the Almoravid Cardete; the Renaissance palaces of Úbeda and Baeza; the watchtowers of the Sierra Mágina. Jaén now shows 29.
• Four monuments named on the Sólo Arquitectura forum, and one asked for by email. Carroza wrote that the map was good but missed the Torre de Lapela, the Castle of Monção, the tower at Monforte de Lemos and El Hierro’s fortress, and guessed, correctly, that they might fall below the atlas’s fame bar. Three are on the map today; El Hierro cannot be, because Wikidata holds no fortification on the island at all. A reader who wrote in asked for the Castillo-palacio de Escalona, one of the most important fortresses of the Toledo frontier and a declared monument since 1922: it is here. antoni0, in the same thread (“en Castilla casi cada pueblo tiene castillo”) is right too, and that one is only partly fixable: the atlas now carries every Castilian castle Wikidata documents with a photograph and coordinates, and the rest need Wikidata before they can need a map.
• The atlas grew from 7,093 to 7,738 landmarks, and the growth was spread on purpose. The first attempt put half of Spain’s new entries in Catalonia and Valencia, two regions nobody had complained about; the settings were changed so that Spain took 100 and the rest went where the thin places were: the Netherlands 76, Portugal 68, Switzerland 59, Ukraine 57, Iran 49, and smaller numbers in fifty more countries, from Frisian stinzen to Crimean isars. Spain now maps 600 and Portugal 200. Every newcomer was checked by its Wikidata type, not its name, and sixteen were turned away: a 2022 presidential office typed “palace”, three town halls, two palaces demolished in 1748 and 1946, two 1940s bunker-forts, a shopping arcade. And the Walls of Seville arrived carrying an English label vandalised on Wikidata in 2024 and unreverted since; it ships under its real name.
• Every new landmark carries a story in all seven editions. 239 had no English article, so their Spanish, Dutch, Russian, Arabic, Romanian or Hungarian lead was translated into English first; then 3,019 translations carried the new stories into German, Spanish, French, Dutch, Polish and Japanese, each labelled as a machine translation and credited to the Wikipedia it came from. Honest footnote: these are genuinely less famous places than what the atlas held before (their Wikipedia articles are read about a third as often), and that is the point of adding them.

20 August 2026: Six new facts per castle: style, architect, heritage status, elevation, visitor numbers, and who really visits

• The fact box grew six rows, every one a checkable Wikidata statement. Architectural style on 1,677 landmarks, the architects on 924, heritage designation on 5,243, elevation on 624, the municipality or district on 6,890, and on 248 of the most famous, the yearly visitor count with the year it was measured: the Palace of Versailles drew about 8,130,000 visitors in 2018, the Alhambra about 2,600,000 in 2023, Himeji Castle about 1,530,000 in 2024. None of this was on the pages before, and each fact links back to the landmark’s own Wikidata entry, where anyone can verify it, or correct it.
• “Is it a UNESCO World Heritage Site?” now gets a straight answer on 271 pages. Where the landmark’s Wikidata entry carries the designation, the page says yes, and says which kind of yes, because Wikidata knows the difference between a site inscribed in its own right, like Versailles, and a building that is one component of an inscribed ensemble, like Neuschwanstein since the 2025 listing of King Ludwig’s castles. Where the entry says nothing, the page claims nothing: absence of a statement is not evidence of absence.
• The regional maps doubled: fifteen became thirty-one. Alsace with its 56 Vosges castles, Normandy, Tuscany, Cathar Country, South Tyrol, the Aosta Valley, Lower Silesia, Aberdeenshire, Northumberland, Shikoku, Rajasthan and the Levant are among the sixteen newcomers, every box tested against the data and its member list read name by name, which is why Shikoku’s edge stops short of Honshu’s Iwakuni and Thuringia’s roof stops short of Saxony-Anhalt’s Rudelsburg, and why the Wachau and Crete, both tested too, shipped nothing: too few landmarks to earn a page. Castle pages now point at their region: Eltz Castle hands you the Moselle guide with its 43 neighbours, one line, where before the regional pages were reachable only from their own hub.
• The search snippets of obscure ruins got their district and their altitude. A ruin whose Wikipedia article is too thin to quote used to introduce itself with almost nothing; its description now names the municipality it stands in, and (where the site sits above 200 m) how high, alongside the nearest city and the neighbours within 25 km it already carried.
• The about page now answers “who vouches for this?”. A new section lists the eighteen independent write-ups the atlas has received (Time Out, Boing Boing, MetaFilter, Neatorama, Maps Mania, GIGAZINE and Karapaia in Japan, Microsiervos in Spain, Bright in the Netherlands, Lelépő in Hungary, Gisplay in Poland, the castle-specialist press and more) plus the front pages of Hacker News, Fark and Menéame and newsletters from Stack Overflow’s The Overflow to 1440. None of it pitched, none of it paid for. The same identity is now machine-readable on every page, pointing at the four public homes of the atlas’s CC0 dataset: GitHub, Zenodo, Kaggle and Hugging Face.

20 August 2026: How many castles are there? The atlas finally answers, and 191 new pages come with it

• “How many castles are there in Spain?” now has an honest page: there is no single number, and here are three. The atlas maps the 500 most notable; Wikidata, the open database the atlas is built from, holds about 9,800 castle-class sites in Spain; and where a published source has committed to a figure, the page quotes it: Germany’s ~25,000 comes from the German Wikipedia’s own article on castles, Wales’s ~400 from the article on Welsh castles, Japan’s twelve surviving original keeps from the article on Japanese castles. Forty-eight countries got the same treatment, each page saying what its numbers count and why they differ, because a count of vanished sites and a count of buildings you can walk into are different questions.
• Country pages stopped underselling themselves. A search result used to say “map of all 500” for Spain while rivals counting every wall fragment said 2,920: the atlas’s honest curation read as the smallest collection on the page. The titles now carry both truths at once: the 500 most notable of ~9,800, mapped. Austria says 183 of ~2,900, Ireland 172 of ~1,300, Switzerland 141 of ~1,700: every total checkable against the page that explains it.
• 160 new day-trip guides, chosen the way castle trips are actually planned. The city guides used to be ranked by population, which gave industrial suburbs a page while Toledo, Segovia, Ávila and Granada had none. Selection now weighs how much the castles around a city are actually read about on Wikipedia, so Dresden, Gdańsk, Blois, Inverness, Koblenz and Galway join, for 400 guides in all. Every guide that already existed stays: not one published page moved or vanished.
• Fifteen regions got the page the country level was too coarse for. The Loire Valley, the Middle Rhine, Transylvania, Andalusia, Kansai and ten more, each an area of the map drawn around the place it names, with its landmarks, its span of centuries and its day-trip guides. Regions whose borders a rectangle could not honestly draw were left out rather than shipped wrong.
• Every castle page now says something no other site computes. Two sentences joined the atlas-context paragraph: how the landmark’s Wikipedia readership ranks against the whole atlas, and how many other landmarks stand within 25 km with a link to the nearest day-trip guide. The same neighbourhood facts now rescue the search snippets of obscure ruins whose articles are too thin to quote: a castle that had nothing to say for itself now at least says where it stands and what stands near it.

19 August 2026: Blenheim Palace was missing, and so were 48 others, because Wikidata files them as houses

• The atlas was missing its eleventh most read landmark. Blenheim Palace (a UNESCO World Heritage Site, Churchill’s birthplace, 89,233 Wikipedia readers in sixty days) sits between Windsor Castle and the Palace of Westminster in every ranking this atlas computes, and was on none of its maps. So was Highclere Castle, which most of the world knows as Downton Abbey. Both cleared every admission test the atlas sets: a photograph, coordinates, an English article, and far more than the eight Wikipedia editions required. Neither had ever been seen by the code that goes looking for castles.
• The reason is a shelf, not a standard. Wikidata does not type Blenheim a palace. It types it an English country house, and Highclere the same, and Kinloch Castle a mansion, and Castle Ward a country house, and Eltham Palace a historic house museum. Not one of those five classes is a subclass of castle, fortress, palace, château, fort, citadel or fortification, so no query the atlas ran could reach them however famous they were. This is the third time the same hole has opened: citadels were invisible until July, plain fortifications until August, and stately homes until now.
• 49 landmarks recovered, across fifteen countries. Beside Blenheim and Highclere: Inveraray, seat of the Dukes of Argyll; Eltham Palace, a medieval royal hall with an Art Deco house grafted onto it; the National Trust’s Castle Ward, Castle Coole, Scotney and Castle Drogo, the last castle built in England; Palazzo Colonna in Rome; the Palace of Kuskovo outside Moscow; four Estonian and four Latvian manor castles; Oheka, Craigdarroch and Dundurn in North America.
• What finds them is the name, because the name is what the building is called. These classes hold tens of thousands of ordinary stately homes, and admitting them wholesale would have buried the atlas in manor houses. Only a building whose own name says castle, palace, château, palazzo or schloss is recovered, which is the line the atlas already drew: Castle Howard has shipped here as a palace from the beginning, and is an English country house too. Chatsworth, Longleat and Waddesdon are not castles, and do not arrive.
• Two candidates were rejected on reading their articles rather than their labels, and one arrived in the wrong state. The Governor’s Palace at Williamsburg is a twentieth-century replica of a building that burned in 1781; Ljubljana’s Presidential Palace is an office of 1899. And Woodstock Palace came in as a standing palace, which it is not: it was destroyed in the Civil War, and building Blenheim in the same park removed, in its article’s own words, what traces remained of the medieval house. It is filed as a ruin, which is what it is.

17 August 2026: Every country page now says where its castles are, when they were built, and shows its own map

• 141 country pages gained a section that answers the question people actually type: where are they? England now says its landmarks cluster thickest around London (76 within a 100 km day trip) then Brighton and Hove and Sunderland, and that they reach from Berwick Castle in the north to Pendennis Castle in the south, about 658 km apart. Germany gathers around Wiesbaden, Poland around Legnica, Japan around Higashiōmi. Every number is counted off the atlas, not written by hand, and the same counts feed a new question in each page’s FAQ, so the two can never disagree.
• And a second section on when they were built. Of the 315 landmarks mapped in England, 260 carry a sourced founding date, most of them from the 11th century; 202 predate 1500 and 22 came after 1700. France peaks in the 13th century, Japan in the 16th, the Netherlands in the 17th. The dated share is stated first and always: a third of the atlas has no sourced year, and a century breakdown that quietly counted only the dated ones would be the same overclaim removed from the titles last week.
• Each country page now carries its own social card instead of the world map. Share Indonesia and you get Indonesia (its own islands, its own 36 lit points, its own name) where until today every one of the 141 previewed as the same picture of Europe. A story about castles in Hungary looked like a story about castles in France.
• The long country lists got shorter to read without losing a single link. England ran to 10,062 visible words, about 9,500 of which were paragraphs about individual castles, so the page’s own writing was three per cent of it. Past the first sixty, cards now show the photo, the name and the facts without the story paragraph. Every castle keeps its link: trimming the list itself would have cut the path to the long tail.
• One thing deliberately left unsaid. The north–south reach is omitted where a country holds distant territory. The atlas places a landmark where it physically stands, so Fort Teremba in New Caledonia really is France’s southernmost and Fort Oranje on Bonaire really is the Netherlands’, both true, and both read as a bug when a page about châteaux announces that France measures 16,446 km top to bottom. Japan keeps its 2,515 km from Hokkaidō to Okinawa, and Spain its 1,939, because those are the fact rather than the footnote.

16 August 2026: The translation ran one way for a month: now every landmark tells its story in English

• 1,292 landmarks whose only Wikipedia article is Hungarian, Russian, Chinese or one of nineteen other languages now tell their story in English. Bobruisk Castle used to open with a paragraph of Russian on its English page, and a reader who could not read it got nothing else. The reason was structural: translation only ever ran outward, from the English lead into the six other editions, so a landmark with no English article had nothing to be translated from and stayed in its own language for good. It now runs both ways. Every one of these stories names the Wikipedia it came from and says plainly that a machine translated it: the condition the licence attaches to a translation, not a courtesy.
• And 156 landmarks that had no story at all now have one: among them Hadrian’s Wall, which ranks ninth in the entire atlas, the Ishtar Gate, the Antonine Wall, the Walls of Constantinople, Mystras, Monteriggioni and the Porta Nigra. They arrived with August’s expansion into walls and gates, and the script that fetches English leads had not been run in full since: every run after it only deepened the stories already there, and never noticed the new pages had none. English coverage across the atlas goes from 79% to 99.6%.
• The six other editions gained the same safety net. 847 pages on /de/, /es/, /fr/, /ja/, /nl/ and /pl/ showed no story at all where the landmark’s own Wikipedia had a good one, because the atlas looked in the reader’s language, then in English, and then stopped. They now fall back to the landmark’s home wiki, in its own language, marked and credited: a paragraph written by a human editor beats a blank space, whatever language it is in.
• 1,857 map cards stopped describing themselves and started describing the castle. Hovering Osaka Castle used to produce the words “Japanese castle”; the Aljafería “Cultural property”; Kenilworth “castle ruin”: a Wikidata label repeating the chip printed beside it. Worse, 380 cards said nothing at all, Gjirokastër among them, on pages whose own text ran for paragraphs. A card now takes the first sentence of the landmark’s own article (including the ones only translated into English today), so 5,642 carry a real description and 61 are left with nothing to say.
• Smaller things. The map’s four controls fit on one row again (the arrows are gone, and the type is now sized per language, because “Tout parcourir / Surprenez-moi” needs half again the room of “Browse / Surprise me” and one size for everybody meant everybody got French’s) instead of leaving About stranded on a second row, and the panel keeps its width so the map keeps its room. On a phone those four now sit above the panel, always visible: reaching the castle list or the game used to mean opening something labelled “Filters”. CastleGuessr drops the instruction bar under the photo on phones: the map is for tapping, and nobody needed telling. The sister-atlas links now read World Train Map, which is what TrainRouter has been called since it moved. And one castle left the map: قصر مارد turned out to be a second Wikidata item for Marid Castle, 117 metres away and already here, so the atlas holds 7,044. The panel also lists Detourmap at last: every other footer on the site has since July. And twenty stories that opened with extraction debris rather than a sentence (a stray }}, a bare line of coordinates, or dewiki’s i3i6) now open with their first words; sixteen of those were German pages, Montezuma Castle and Fort Mackinac among them.

11 August 2026: Every short story becomes the whole story, in all seven languages at once

• 2,338 landmarks whose page told a single line now tell their whole article. Wherever the English Wikipedia lead ran under 400 characters, the atlas now reads the entire article (the history sections, not just the definition), and the page's story budget doubles to fit it. Karlštejn, which introduced itself in one sentence, now carries five paragraphs of Charles IV, the Imperial Regalia and the Hussite siege.
• The new text was read for dates the way this atlas always reads them: 327 more landmarks now state a sourced founding, bringing dated coverage to 75%, and the rejects show the guards working. An architect's lifespan in parentheses is not a founding; "for example Glenveagh Castle was constructed in 1870" dates Glenveagh, not the page it appears on; a belltower added in 1905 does not date a 14th-century castle; and "built before 1400" or "tradition holds" now honestly wear the "c." they deserve. Písac is a case study: its article offers Pachacuti's reign years in parentheses, and the honest reading ("no earlier than 1440") is what the atlas now states.
• The six other languages caught up with English in one night: more than 22,600 stories were translated anew, replacing the single-sentence translations that stood where a reader's own Wikipedia has no article. And where a reader's Wikipedia has an article that says less than the English one, the page now keeps the native lead first (real prose by a human editor), and continues below it with the English story, clearly marked as a machine translation with its own credit. Each language edition now tells, as nearly as the sources allow, everything the English page tells.
• Two changes for the search engines: every castle page's search snippet now ends with what only this atlas knows (the landmark's rank in its country, its century, and that it sits on an interactive map) instead of duplicating Wikipedia's first sentence; and every hero photograph now declares its creator, its licence and its Wikimedia Commons source page in machine-readable form.

10 August 2026: The atlas reads eleven more languages for its dates, Zvečan comes home, and every page now promises only what it holds

• The year-reading pass learned Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Hungarian, Czech, Slovak, Turkish, Greek, Japanese, Chinese and Korean, and 333 more landmarks now state their founding, read from their own articles, never guessed (dated coverage: 66% → 71%). The chain finds dates where you would not look: Sacsayhuamán's Killke origin around 1100 arrived via the Czech article, Stirling's 14th-century core via the Korean one, the Vilnius Castle Complex's 10th-century beginnings via the Chinese, and Van Fortress now reaches back to the 9th century BC with the Urartians. Persian was left out on purpose: a bare year on the Persian Wikipedia is routinely Solar Hijri (1250 there is 1871 here), and a silent 600-year error is worse than honest silence.
• Every candidate date was read against its source sentence before it was believed, and the rejects tell you why: Gloucester Castle's lead offers 1787 (the year it was demolished and a prison built on the site; the Vilnius articles offer 1390) the year the Teutonic Knights burned the Crooked Castle; one Slovak lead dates a mining academy's relocation; an Italian one, the year researchers discovered a moat. None of those are foundings, and none of them are in the data.
• Zvečan Fortress now stands in Kosovo, where it physically stands, in Zvečan municipality north of Mitrovica. A reader caught it filed under Serbia, which is what Wikidata's country statement says; the atlas files every landmark by where it stands on the ground, and now this one too.
• And the atlas has a new landmark, by request: Dún Dealgan Motte, Cú Chulainn's Castle in Dundalk, the Norman motte on the hill the Táin Bó Cúailnge makes the birthplace of Cú Chulainn, today the centre of a local preservation campaign. Jaki McCarrick wrote in to report it missing; its four Wikipedia editions sit under the atlas's usual notability floor, and that is exactly what the reader's door is for. Ireland now counts 171.
• The country pages stop promising what a third of the atlas could not deliver. "Each with its photo, founding century and story" was simply false for undated landmarks, so every country page in all seven languages now claims the founding date only where every landmark has one, and says honestly how many do: "315 landmarks, every one mapped with a photo and its story (232 with sourced founding dates)." Search-result titles carry the same per-entry guarantee where it fits, and a new image sitemap pairs each castle page with its Commons photograph, so the photos behind every pin are no longer invisible to search engines.

9 August 2026: The castles that were really palaces, the palaces that were really ruins, and 431 years the atlas could finally state

• A "castle" built after 1800 is almost never a castle (the age of castles was over), and this release acts on it. Every castle-category landmark dated after 1800 was re-read against its own encyclopaedia lead, and forty moved to the palace category: Schwerin, whose German name has said Schloss all along; Miramare, a Habsburg seaside residence; Peckforton, "a Victorian country house built in the style of a medieval castle": the styling no longer outranks the noun; Glenveagh's "castellated mansion"; the Schlösser of Luxembourg and Sweden. The landmarks the world genuinely calls castles keep the name: Casa Loma, Larnach, Hearst Castle and Penrhyn stay castles by identity, as their communities asked, and Saint Michael's Castle in St Petersburg stays a castle because Paul I really did build one (moat, drawbridges and all) in 1800.
• Ten "castles" turned out to be forts wearing the word: Castle Williams and Castle Clinton are circular batteries in New York Harbor, Goryōkaku is a star fort, the Eternal Golden Castle is a coastal battery in Tainan, and three castellated American armories are armories. All are filed under fortress now. In the other direction, the Reduta in Bratislava (a neoclassical concert hall that carried the castle label) is a palace, and Kosava Castle is recorded as what its own name says it is: the Puslowski Palace.
• The ruin detection learned Spanish and French. It had read English, German, Polish and Dutch leads, so a landmark whose only articles are Spanish or French could say "en ruinas" or "en ruine" in its first sentence and never be heard. Thirty-two landmarks are now filed as the ruins their own articles describe, Dryslwyn and Wiston in Wales, Tiffauges, Haut-Barr and Pflixbourg in France, a dozen Spanish castles among them. Four that the French Wikipedia calls ruins were kept whole on the evidence of the ground: Medvedgrad above Zagreb (restored, a visitor centre), Oshi Castle (its turret rebuilt in 1988), Puivert (the keep stands roofed) and Moret (the donjon stands): a stale foreign lead is not a demolition order.
• And the years. Twenty-one landmarks carried a rebuild, replica or restoration date as their founding: Peel Castle said 1860 when its own lead says the Norwegians built it in the 11th century; Dankwarderode said 1963; Inverness said 1836 when castles have stood on its rock since 1057; De Haar said 1892, the year of its celebrated rebuild, not 1391, its first mention. All corrected against their own leads. Then the year-reading pass learned French, Spanish, Polish and Dutch on top of English and German, and 410 previously undated landmarks now state their founding, read from their articles, never guessed: Kızıl Kule's exact 1226, Bled Castle's 11th century, Chittorgarh's 8th. The atlas now dates 4,644 of its 7,044 landmarks; the remaining third say nothing datable in any of six languages, and honest silence beats a guess.

8 August 2026: Twenty-two things that were never castles leave the atlas, found by the atlas auditing itself

• Nobody reported any of this. Every fix below came out of an audit the atlas ran on itself, and the method is the part worth writing down, because the old one had quietly stopped working. Previous sweeps read each landmark's NAME and its one-line description, which is how a wall, a bunker and a city of a quarter of a million people all reached the top hundred wearing the word castle. This sweep asked Wikidata what each of the 7,044 landmarks is, by type, in one pass over the whole atlas. It found twenty-two things that were never castles and eleven more filed under the wrong one of the four categories. Three new automated checks ship with it, so each class of error stays fixed rather than being found again in a month: a release now refuses to build if the map cards have gone stale, if the machine-readable summary this site publishes contradicts the data, or if any page still links a sister atlas at a domain that has moved.
• The most-read castle page in the United States was NORAD. Not a castle, not a fortress, not a building: Wikidata calls it a multinational military command, which is to say an organisation. It had ranked 97th in the world, inside the band this atlas labels world-famous, and it was the first landmark listed on the page for the United States. That page now opens with Fort Sumter.
• It had company. The Israeli West Bank barrier and the Mexico–United States border wall were both filed as castles, ranked 161st and 217th. The release earlier today removed three other twentieth-century barriers on the stated grounds that a separation wall is a fortification in the dictionary sense and in no other; it simply missed these two, because that pass searched names and these are only identifiable from their type. The Führerbunker, the Churchill War Rooms and the Battle of Britain Bunker have gone the same way, alongside the twentieth-century gun batteries that left in August.
• Groningen was in the atlas. The city, ranked 22nd in the world, illustrated by a map of itself drawn in 1575. Culemborg, Weesp and Doesburg were in too. All four are typed "fortified town" by Wikidata, which is true of their history and not of what they are: places where a quarter of a million people between them live now. The line is habitation, not age: Mystras, Numantia, Ani and Carteia are ruins and they stay, and so do fortress towns like Terezín and Neuf-Brisach whose whole identity is the fortress. A disused Tube station, an urban park eighteen metres from Osaka Castle, Valletta's 2014 Renzo Piano gate and a former malthouse in Elbląg also left.
• Groningen keeps a landmark, and it is the right one. Fort Bourtange was in the atlas all along, at 1,204th, unrecognisable because Wikidata labels it "Bourtange Fortress": an inversion no other source uses. It is the five-bastion earthwork thrown up in 1593 on the one road across the Bourtanger Moor, built to cut the Spanish supply line to the city and now restored to how it looked in the 1740s. It carries its English Wikipedia name from today, and it is pinned, so a star fort with eleven Wikipedia editions can never quietly fall below a threshold.
• Then the same question was asked a second time, deliberately: if the Brandenburg Gate could sit at ninth for weeks, what else is here on a technicality? Six more. Three are defence lines: the Hindenburg Line, a hundred and fifty kilometres of First World War trench from Arras to Laffaux, which the atlas had filed as a castle at 190th; Israel's Bar Lev Line of 1968, a sand rampart along the Suez Canal; and the Toblerone Line, a row of concrete anti-tank blocks poured in Vaud in 1938. Two are working United States Army posts that inherited the word fort and nothing else about it, Fort Gordon and Fort Polk. The last is Bishop Castle in Colorado, begun by one man in 1969 and still unfinished, which English Wikipedia describes as a roadside attraction while putting the word castle in quotation marks: when the encyclopaedia will not commit to the noun, this atlas should not either.
• Knowing what to keep is the same work as knowing what to cut, and the sweep is only worth trusting if it can tell them apart. Hadrian's Wall, the Antonine Wall and the Limes Germanicus stay: Roman frontier works with forts strung along them, and a heritage class of their own. The Arco de Santa María in Burgos is also typed a triumphal arch and also stays, because it is one of the twelve gates the city had in the Middle Ages, merely refaced for Charles V: a defensive gate in ceremonial dress, which is the exact inverse of the Brandenburg Gate. Twenty-three historic forts carry the type "military base" only because they still stand on military land (Kangra, Attock, the citadel of Ghazni), and every one of them is a fortification and stays. So do the follies that are also castles, Swallow's Nest and Gwrych among them.
• What all of these had in common is how they were found. Every previous sweep read the name and the description; this one read what Wikidata says each thing is. "Castle in Bavaria" was never the tell. The type field named all fifteen in a single query, and it also settled eleven that were in the right atlas but the wrong category: Daikaku-ji and Shōren-in are recorded as imperial residences and are now palaces rather than castles, two Transylvanian fortified churches are fortresses as Biertan already was, Mystras is a ruin, and Bir Hakeim, a fort in the Libyan desert, is no longer a palace.
• And the cards learned to speak again. A card should tell you something the chips beside it do not, and three thousand six hundred and eighty of them were saying things like "Castle in Bavaria, Germany, Europe" (that was Neuschwanstein), or "Palace in Vienna, Austria", or "Japanese castle complex". The pass that writes a readable opening line from Wikipedia had not been re-run since the atlas grew from about 2,400 landmarks to over 7,000, so it was writing for three of them. It now writes for all 3,700, and a release cannot ship again until it has: the check is part of the pre-flight, with the count that must be zero.
• A related twenty-four were saying something worse than too little. A Wikidata description is a noun phrase ("Castle in Bavaria, Germany"), and these opened with a verb, so they read as sentences begun in the middle: "Was built under orders of William the Silent and completed in 1593", "Has a long history. The southern tower used to be…", "Is the medieval ruin." They had survived every check because they are long and specific, and length was the only question being asked. Grammar is the right question, and twenty-two of them now open with a proper sentence instead. The last two have no English article to draw one from.
• A hundred and ninety-one photographs were being used under licences that require naming the photographer, and named nobody. Their Commons pages predate the machine-readable author field, so the credit line read "Photo · Wikimedia", for Chenonceau, Stirling Castle, Qasr Amra, Livadia. Every one of them now names a person, and the published CSV and GeoJSON carry the photographer and the licence as columns, along with a link back to the landmark's page, which the CSV never had.
• Smaller repairs. The three castles of the Dahner Burgengruppe (Altdahn, Grafendahn and Tanstein) stood at one identical point, so the map drew three castles as one dot and only ever opened one of them; they are 50 to 110 metres apart and now sit where they stand. Six landmarks were founded in this century according to the atlas, which is a good way to notice a restoration date wearing a founding date's clothes: Namdaemun was not built in 2013, the year it reopened after the fire, but in 1398. The Venetian palace listed as "Hotel Danieli" is now Palazzo Dandolo, the building rather than its tenant. Lions' Gate in Jerusalem was the one landmark with a country and no country code. Six more maps and plans have become photographs.
• The file this site publishes for AI assistants was contradicting itself. It said the atlas reads 26 Wikipedia language editions when it reads 22, and in one sentence gave a dated and an undated count that added up to the atlas as it was two revisions ago. Every number in it is now checked against the data on every build.
• The atlas now holds 7,044 landmarks across 141 countries.

8 August 2026: The map learns where the sea ends, the game borrows the site's own controls, and Crimea stops depending on luck

• The night chart had a real problem and a reviewer was right to say so. Keir Clarke of Maps Mania wrote that the map was barely legible, and it measured: the land was separated from the sea by a contrast ratio of 1.21 to 1, where three to one is the floor for a graphic that carries meaning. Finding the Adriatic or the Gulf of Bothnia meant already knowing where they were. The land is lighter now, and (the part that actually does the work) the coastline has stopped being a faint wash and become a drawn line. A map separates land from water with a coast, not by hoping two fills differ enough. The sea itself never moved, so it is still a night chart.
• The panel could not be read either. Its faintest labels sat at a contrast of 1.98 to 1 against their own background, at roughly nine pixels; the standard for text that size is 4.5. Thirty-nine of those tiers have been raised across the panel, the castle card and the game, with the ordering between them kept intact.
• CastleGuessr aims properly. The cursor was the plain system crosshair, a thin dark cross that all but vanished against dark land, in a game whose only move is clicking an exact spot. It is now the same high-contrast reticle the atlas has always used. The game also carries the site's own language and theme controls at last: every edition is one click away without leaving your round, and switching between light and dark now actually repaints the board, which it never did before.
• A reader pointed out, kindly, that the atlas could not decide what it contained: the name says castles, the title added fortresses, the description added palaces, and the legend then offered four categories. Ruins are about a fifth of everything here. Every place the atlas lists what it holds now names all four, in all seven languages.
• Crimea. A reader repaired the Wikidata records for the peninsula's castles, fortresses and palaces so that this atlas could show them, and in checking that work we found something worse than a gap: Wikidata records these landmarks with two countries at once, often at equal weight, so which one the atlas printed came down to the order two rows arrived in. Every Crimean landmark had read "Ukraine" by luck rather than by rule. Coordinates decide it now. Crimea is Ukraine, and it no longer depends on chance. Six landmarks joined at the same time, including Swallow's Nest and the Khan's Palace at Bakhchysarai: two of the most photographed places on the peninsula, absent until now.
• Northern Ireland had 15 landmarks against Ireland's 170 and Scotland's 144, and not because it is short of castles. The atlas sorts the United Kingdom into its four countries, but it was doing so after deciding what to include, so during selection a Belfast castle's country was simply "United Kingdom", and no UK country could ever be topped up. It now sorts them first. Northern Ireland has 32, among them Killyleagh, Monea, Antrim and Harry Avery's.
• Eight landmarks were showing a map, a plan, an engraving or a coat of arms instead of a photograph. All 6,903 images were audited; 31 were not photographs, and Wikimedia Commons had a genuine replacement for eight of them: Domus Augustana, Southampton Castle, Fort d'Évegnée, Fort Knox in Maine, Okopy, Inzlingen, the Puerta de Santiago in Melilla and the Citadel of Homs. The rest keep their drawings on purpose: Worcester Castle, Fort Coligny, Shalfak and the others are demolished, drowned or vanished, and a period plan is the only surviving picture there is.
• The atlas now holds 7,066 landmarks across 141 countries.

7 August 2026: The atlas stops giving up on a tab you opened in the background, and Japanese stops meeting English

• Open one of these maps in a background tab, leave it a few seconds and then switch to it, and the atlas had quietly settled for its plainest basemap (country outlines, no coastlines, no relief, no place names), and stayed there for the rest of the visit. A browser does not draw a tab nobody is looking at, and the map library assembles every style inside a drawing step, so in the waiting tab nothing could load. The map read that silence as a tile server that was down, swapped in the offline chart, and spent both of its recovery attempts while nobody was watching. That clock now starts only once the page is genuinely on screen, and a tile server that really is unreachable still gives way to the standby map as quickly as it ever did.
• CastleGuessr could lose the world it is played on. The board opens as bare land with a grid and slides the real map underneath the moment the tile server answers, but if that answer arrived before the board was ready, the swap was abandoned for good and the whole session was played on an empty stage. That is exactly what a background tab does, and on a repeat visit an answer served from the cache can do it too. The tiles now wait for the board rather than the other way round. That same swap could also wipe your pin, the castle and the line between them off the map if it landed after you had already tapped, while the result card still told you how far out you were; the board now redraws the round it is holding.
• The game page is the game now: the description that sat one screen below the board is gone.
• And a round whose photograph refuses to load offers the next castle instead of leaving you to guess at nothing.
• Japanese readers were still meeting English on 141 landmark pages: every fortress added to the atlas this week, from Mont-Saint-Michel Abbey to the Citadel of Cairo and the Walls of Jerusalem. All 141 open in Japanese now. Of the pages that carry a description at all, 92.6 per cent read in Japanese; what is left are landmarks documented only in a third language, which are shown in that language and credited to it.

6 August 2026: CastleGuessr gets its map back, and on a phone the photo steps out of its way

• The game had no board. Yesterday gave the atlas real relief, and the game builds its board out of the atlas’s own style with every label stripped away, so it inherited the new hillshade layer and left the elevation source behind. MapLibre discards an entire style over a single layer pointing at a source that is not there, and by then the working one has been taken down: the result was a game whose only means of answering, the world map, was simply absent, on desktop and phone alike. The board carries the elevation now, ignores any layer whose source it does not have, and keeps its chart grid instead of losing it the moment the basemap arrives. Every map style the site draws is put through MapLibre’s own validator on each build, so this kind of fault cannot ship quietly again.
• On a phone the photo had become the question and the answer’s hiding place: it filled the panel, and the map you are asked to tap lay underneath. It is now a thumbnail in the top corner (under a tenth of the screen), and a tap opens it up when you want a closer look. The instruction moved to its own line below it, the running session score appears on the bar, which phones never had, and once the round is played the photo stretches into a strip across the result card.
• Polish readers were being offered castles “w Macedonia Północna”. North Macedonia was missing from the table of locative forms, so the name stood undeclined in every heading, description and question on that page; it reads w Macedonii Północnej now. French gained the same country’s article forms.
• Two different castles were both called Janowiec Castle (one the ruin above the Vistula in Lublin province, the other a border castle 450 km west), and both, unhelpfully, stand in a village named Janowiec. The second is Janowiec Castle (Lubusz) from now on.

5 August 2026: The fame ranking learns to read every language, Poland trades ninety entries for its dignity, and the land gets its shape back

• Fame was being judged in English. The ranking blends how widely a landmark is documented with how widely it is read, and the reading half counted English Wikipedia only, so a castle whose article exists in Polish, German or Spanish and nowhere else scored zero readers, and sank. That was 1,408 landmarks, one in five on the atlas. Readership is now summed across every language edition a landmark has: Neuschwanstein is read 850,000 times a year in English and 290,000 more in German, and Moszna Palace turns out to have eight times the readers its English article suggested. Not one landmark is unranked now. The old caveat on the ranking page (that the numbers leaned English) is gone, because it is no longer true.
• Poland has lost ninety entries and is better for it. Answering a Polish reader’s complaint that the map was empty where he lived, the country’s target was raised to Germany’s that same morning, but Poland’s pool of well-documented castles runs out around 360, so the last ninety admissions were the scrapings: places carried by two Wikipedias, several not even named, only described (“Castle in Dzięgielów”, “Manor house II, so-called castle in Stary Sielec”). They are removed, the target is set where the evidence actually ends, and a floor can no longer buy quality that is not there. Poland now stands at 361 landmarks, none below three languages.
• Seven Polish palaces had been filed as castles, because the classifier read English and German and never Polish, so a landmark whose only article opens “Pałac w…” was never asked what it was. It reads Polish now, and eighteen landmarks moved to the right category.
• And a gun battery has left the castle map. Battery Dietl is a German coastal artillery position of 1942, and it had been filed as a castle; nine more 20th-century emplacements went with it, most carried by two Wikipedias. The 19th-century coastal forts stay (Tung Chung of 1817, Murray of 1841, Konstantin of 1840) because a fort you can visit is a landmark and a wartime gun position is an installation.
• The map itself now shows the ground. Real elevation shades every hillside, ridge and valley, drawn from open government terrain data, so it is finally visible why a castle sits where it does. It costs the opening view nothing: the relief arrives as you come down towards a country, which is also the first point at which a hillside means anything.

5 August 2026: The Dutch edition learns Dutch, Poland stops looking empty, and the citadels come home

• The Dutch atlas now reads Dutch. 3,961 landmark stories that had been standing in English on /nl/ were translated, so Dutch was the last edition where a reader could meet a castle in a language they had not asked for. With it goes the last machine-translation notice on the site: no edition carries one now, because none of them needs to; each translated story says so in its own credit line, which is the honest place to say it.
• Poland was thin and a reader said so plainly. On the Polish link site wykop, jaroslaw-lazarczyk called the map useless where he lives: Lubusz Voivodeship showed two castles when several stand within twenty kilometres, and arturo1983 and bialy100k said the same of their own regions. They were right. Poland has gone from 279 landmarks to 451, Lubusz from fourteen to twenty-two, and the same pass repaired five Polish entries whose Wikidata labels had shipped a street address, a genitive ending and two buildings named after whatever later stood on the site.
• And a whole class of fortress was missing. Berat Castle (Albania’s UNESCO citadel, with a village still living inside its walls) was absent because Wikidata files it as a district of Berat, so no query the atlas asks could ever have found it. Checking whether others were hidden the same way turned up fifty-six, among them the Cairo Citadel, read in thirty-five languages. Twenty-nine are now on the map (Saladin’s citadel above Cairo, Mont-Saint-Michel, the Alamo, the walls of Jerusalem, Anadoluhisarı on the Bosphorus, Skopje’s Kale, Kotor’s walls, the Amman Citadel, the Kasbah of the Udayas, Rhodes, Kangra, Cổ Loa’s spiral ramparts and the Warsaw Barbican), and the query that missed them has been fixed at the root, so the rest arrive on their own. The atlas now maps 7,003 landmarks across 141 countries, Bahrain among them for the first time.
• CastleGuessr keeps only the photograph. The castle’s name is gone from the board, and so are the faint dots that used to scatter every other castle across the map: between them they answered half the question, since the name could be searched and the dots showed which neighbourhoods were even possible. One photograph, the whole Earth, one tap. The name arrives with the reveal, where it belongs.

5 August 2026: CastleGuessr finds its final form, every photo names its photographer, and 364 silent pages find their voice

• CastleGuessr is now the one game its name promised: the shape proven on our sister atlas Movie Scene Map. The daily puzzle and the endless typing rounds are gone, autocomplete and all. Every round asks the same clean question: here is the castle, name and photo. Where does it stand? One tap on the world map answers, scored out of 5,000 by how close you land, and the reveal draws the line from your tap to the truth. The board also stopped naming cities: a map that prints Osaka would answer for you. Play as long as you like; rounds, average and best stay on your device.
• Every photograph now names its photographer. 6,469 of the atlas’s 6,653 photos carry their author’s name from Wikimedia Commons (on the map card, on each castle’s page and in the game) beside the license each photographer chose. The rest record no machine-readable author and stay credited to Commons itself.
• 364 landmarks that had no story in any of the atlas’s seven languages now tell one in their own. Their only Wikipedia article lives in Hungarian, Russian, Chinese, Romanian, Portuguese, Czech, Arabic, Greek…, so that is the story their pages now open with, marked with its language and credited to its edition, in place of a bare data sentence.
• And the splitter that had been quietly beheading sentences at abbreviations (an extract that ended “located in Strelna in St.” and called itself complete) is fixed at every place it lived, including the freshly caught hyphen case (“Feldbrunnen-St. Niklaus”). Fifty-one pages whose broken sources had refused translation now read whole in Japanese, Polish, Spanish, French and German.

4 August 2026: A reader caught the rankings broken, and a caravan of fixes rode in behind

• On Menéame, yarkyark looked at the fame ranking and said the quiet part: castles nobody has heard of ranked high, “and the Alhambra doesn’t show up”. He was right, and it was worse than it looked: a refresh two days earlier had silently dropped the readership numbers for 5,807 of the atlas’s landmarks, so fame was being judged on Wikipedia coverage alone (Spain’s page ranked Numantia first and the Alhambra #107). The leak is fixed at its source, every landmark’s readership was refetched, and the Alhambra sits where it belongs. Earlier doubts from runxel and prmph on Hacker News were the same wound showing; thank you all.
• 241 landmarks joined: the atlas now maps 6,653 across 140 countries. @magpieuae shared the map with “tho not UAE”, and fairly: the Emirates stood at exactly one entry. Now eighteen (Al Fahidi, Fujairah, Sharjah, Ajman, Qasr Al Muwaiji), and Oman grew from seven to thirteen, from Rustaq to Khasab. Guinea-Bissau and Wallis and Futuna enter for the first time (Talietumu, a walled Tongan fort on ʻUvea). By email, Eloy pointed out that Catalonia’s record lives in Catalan (his example, the Castell de Burriac, had no English article at all), so the atlas now reads Catalan, Basque and Galician Wikipedia for Spain, whose count grew to 500; that also answers the Valladolid and Extremadura gaps Stathamdepueblo and Jjota named. Reader reports became pins: Fort Wilkins in Michigan (Elizabeth, by email), Biertan fortified church (rob74) and Montezuma Castle (1970-01-01). Two could not come yet, and honesty beats silence: Coolmain and Kilbrittain Castle in Cork (Christopher Willoughby’s report) have no usable Wikidata item (photo, coordinates or the item itself are missing), and neither, still, does Siyu Fort in Kenya.
• Every localized page now carries its name in both tongues: 大阪城 answers to Osaka Castle in the tab title and under the heading, on all six non-English editions. And the openings that arrived broken (“S. Virgin Islands.” standing alone where a sentence should be) are repaired at the splitter that broke them, so nearly a thousand pages across five languages traded English fallbacks or fragments for whole sentences in their own language.
• The guessing game is now CastleGuessr, and it learned the move its new name promises: pin mode. You know the castle (the photo and name are right there), but where does it stand? One tap on the world map is your answer, scored like the classics: 5,000 points inside 25 km, fading with every kilometre you missed by. Daily and endless play on unchanged.
• And a small mercy on the map itself: a card you hovered but never clicked no longer swallows the scroll wheel (zooming works with a card open, and a card whose text overflows still scrolls itself).

4 August 2026: German, Spanish, French and Polish now read in their own languages too

• What happened to the Japanese edition yesterday has now happened to four more. 9,844 landmark descriptions that opened in English on the German, Spanish, French and Polish editions have been translated: 1,643 in German, 2,587 in Spanish, 1,878 in French and 3,736 in Polish. Together with yesterday’s Japanese, five of this atlas’s seven editions now tell every story they can in the reader’s own language, and the description under a search result comes in that language too, which is the part a search engine reads.
• The translations keep the habits each language actually uses, not English ones wearing a costume: Roman-numeral centuries in Spanish and French (siglo XIII, XIIIe siècle), French spacing before its colons and guillemets, Polish declining foreign names through its cases (zaprojektowanych przez Guya Maunsella). Every number, date and original-script gloss is carried across untouched, and each translated page names the English Wikipedia article it came from and says plainly that a machine translated it.
• Some 380 pages across the five editions stayed English on purpose. Their source extracts arrive damaged from upstream (cut off mid-sentence, or starting mid-word), and translating a broken sentence only produces a broken sentence in a second language. One such fault was found and fixed while checking this batch: an abbreviation like “the U.S. state of Montana” was being split at the full stop after U, leaving a fragment that read as a whole sentence. The check found its mirror too: extracts that end at an abbreviation (“located in Strelna in St.”) had lost their final words, and fifteen Japanese translations published yesterday had carried that missing name into print. They have been withdrawn, and all those pages now wait for a better source instead.
• The Dutch edition still shows English where its stories are missing, and still says so. Where an edition no longer does, that notice is gone: a warning that has stopped being true is worse than no warning at all.

3 August 2026: The Japanese edition now reads Japanese

• Since the Japanese edition opened in July, it has carried an honest compromise: where no Japanese Wikipedia article existed, the page told its story in English, and said so. That compromise ends today. 4,122 pages now open in Japanese, machine-translated from the English Wikipedia lead each page has always credited, joining the 2,199 landmarks whose Japanese Wikipedia tells their story natively. All but 98 of the atlas’s landmark pages now read Japanese: the descriptions under search results included.
• The translation stays honest about itself: every translated page says 機械翻訳 (machine translated) in its credit line, keeps every number, date, name and original-script gloss exactly as the source gives them, and links the English original. And the 98 holdouts stay English deliberately: their source extracts arrive damaged (cut off mid-sentence upstream), and a broken sentence translated is still a broken sentence. They wait for a better source, not a braver guess.

3 August 2026: Tap the map to guess, and keep playing past midnight

• The guessing game grew a second way to answer: the world itself. A night map of every landmark now sits under the photo: tap anywhere and the nearest castle dot becomes your guess, answered as ever with distance, direction and closeness, and every try leaves a colored ring behind showing how you closed in. Typing a name works exactly as before.
• And midnight no longer ends the game: a new endless mode deals castle after castle from the same famous five hundred once the daily is done (or instead of it) with its own played-and-won tally. The daily castle, its streaks and its share grid stay untouched, and the map’s panel now carries a one-word Guess button, so the game is never more than a tap away.
• Also mended: the Dutch, Spanish and French editions of the game page were showing the atlas instead of the game. All seven languages now play.
• By evening the game found its true frame: the board is now the atlas itself. The full-screen night map carries the round, and the photo, guesses and hints float over it in the same panel the homepage uses. On a phone the panel tucks behind the top bar so the whole world is tappable: your latest guess rides beneath the bar while it’s closed, and the reveal opens on its own when the round ends.

2 August 2026: Spain nearly doubles: the promise to the thin countries, kept

• When this atlas reached the Hacker News front page in July, the sharpest criticism was coverage: Castilla y León showed nine castles where some three hundred stand, and Germany, Ireland, Sweden and Jordan were nearly as thin. Today’s release is that promise kept, and the mechanism matters: the same country-scoped Wikidata sweep that once opened China now runs for Spain, Germany, Poland, Ireland, Sweden and Jordan, joined by a Swedish-language sweep (the 22nd Wikipedia edition the atlas reads). The bar did not move: every entry still needs a photo, coordinates and a Wikipedia article. The atlas grows from 5,814 to 6,412 landmarks.
• Spain grows from 230 to 433: the largest single-country jump the atlas has had. The Walls of Ávila and the Roman Walls of Lugo, both World Heritage; Seville’s Torre del Oro; Toledo’s medieval gate circuit from the Puerta de Bisagra to Bab al-Mardum; Numantia, where Rome needed twenty years and its best general; the Galician castros from Santa Trega down the Atlantic coast, and across Castilla y León the castles of Ciudad Rodrigo, Aguilar de Campoo, Puebla de Sanabria and dozens more.
• A Warsaw reader’s July complaint is now answered in full. The Citadel joined in July; today the nineteenth-century ring of forts around the city follows it: Fort VIII Służew, Mokotów, Włochy, Wawer and their brothers, with the two Zegrze works up the Narew. Poland stands at 279 landmarks. Thanks again to I claim sanctuary.
• Ireland grows from 107 to 168: Dun Aengus on its Aran cliff edge, Waterford’s Reginald’s Tower (Ireland’s oldest civic building), and the Martello tower where Ulysses opens, an 1804 fortress and the atlas now says so. Sweden grows from 131 to 196: Visby’s medieval wall, the Öland ring forts from Sandby borg to Eketorp, and Torsburgen, Scandinavia’s largest ancient hillfort. Jordan adds Qasr Bshir (perhaps the best-preserved Roman fort standing anywhere), and only three companions, because every further Jordanian site now needs a better Wikidata entry, not a better query.
• The sweep also surfaced what this atlas will not carry: two modern border fences, Franco’s Pyrenean bunker line, a Cold-War data centre in a Stockholm rock shelter, three lighthouses, four Roman cities and a Dublin school were all typed as fortifications somewhere in Wikidata, and every one was excluded by hand. A curated atlas earns its keep by what it refuses. The count stands at 6,412 landmarks across 138 countries: Germany, whose tens of thousands of castles nobody can map one by one, now carries 450 of its most notable.

2 August 2026: The Andes join the atlas, and Westminster takes its seat

• A thread on Lemmy’s map community did what good threads do: it found the blind spots. The sharpest came from @groet@feddit.org: Peru’s mountains are covered in Inca ruins, and this atlas held four Peruvian entries. The cause was the citadel lesson all over again: Wikidata types the great Andean sites “archaeological site”, a sibling of every class the atlas sweeps, so no castle, fortress or palace query could ever see them. Twelve hand-verified sites join today: Machu Picchu (1.3 million readers a year, instantly the second-most-read landmark on the whole atlas) Sacsayhuamán, Ollantaytambo, Písac, Choquequirao, Chan Chan, Vilcabamba, Vitcos, Huchuy Qosqo, Waqrapukara, Tambo Colorado and Pikillaqta. Temples, terraces and geoglyphs stay out of scope, and Peru certainly holds more: improving an Inca site’s Wikidata entry (coordinates, a Commons photo, a Wikipedia article) is the way onto the map.
• @ThanksForAllTheFish@sh.itjust.works asked the obvious question: where is the Palace of Westminster? Wikidata types it “parliament building”, so a castle atlas never saw Britain’s most famous palace. It is legally still a royal palace, was a principal royal residence from the eleventh century until the fire of 1512, and now stands where it belongs: straight into England’s top five. The same comment challenged the Palace of Whitehall’s high rank: that rank is honest. It comes from the palace’s own article being read 213,000 times a year (for 168 years this was the monarch’s main residence, with more than 1,500 rooms), and the atlas marks it as the ruin it is.
• @porcelainpitcher@lemmy.today wondered what Melbourne or Sydney could possibly show, and the thread answered itself: Fort Nepean at the Port Phillip heads (suggested by @FluidBeef@quokk.au), which fired the British Empire’s first shot of the First World War, and Brisbane’s moated Fort Lytton (@geolaw@aus.social). Sydney itself adds Bare Island Fort and the Middle Head Fortifications, and Newcastle adds Fort Scratchley, which returned fire on a Japanese submarine in 1942. Australia grows from three landmarks to eight.
• @doubtingtammy@lemmy.ml pointed at a class the atlas had never considered: America’s castle-style National Guard armories, “more castle-like than the fortresses listed”. The three named prove the point and join as castles: the towered 1895 State Armory in Springfield, Providence’s Cranston Street Armory (“the Castle” to its city) and the crenellated 1893 Lynn Armory.
• The atlas now counts 5,814 landmarks across 138 countries.

31 July 2026: The atlas now reads French

• Every page of this atlas now exists in French at /fr/, all 5,793 landmark pages, 138 country pages, every ranking, the city day-trip guides, the statistics, data and about pages, and the daily game. It is the seventh language; the switcher now runs English → 日本語 → Deutsch → Español → Français → Polski → Nederlands.
• French Wikipedia covers this subject like almost no other edition: 3,394 landmarks (58.6% of the atlas, second only to German) open with their frwiki lead, and le château de Versailles reads as fr.wikipedia wrote it. French city exonyms cover 99% of the pool (Londres, Cracovie, Ratisbonne). The rest keep the English story, marked lang="en" and credited honestly.
• French fuses its grammar into the map: every country stores its full prepositional phrase (en France, au Portugal, aux Pays-Bas, à Malte, none of it derivable from the name), landmark articles are read off each frwiki lead with their casing (le château de Versailles, l’Alhambra), and "de" contracts on its own (près du Caire, la renommée du château de Foix). Centuries are Roman (XIIIe siècle), BC is av. J.-C.
• Shipping French also fixed five gaps the Spanish edition had shipped with, from the English fame sentence on every /es/ castle page to the missing compare table on /es/castles/rankings/ and the untranslated near hub, all healed in the same build.
• The About page now carries visible Changelog and Privacy buttons at the top in every language, and the sister-atlas links across the site now read TrainRouter · Sunshine Atlas · Detourmap · FilmMap.

31 July 2026: The atlas now reads Spanish

• Every page of this atlas now exists in Spanish at /es/, all 5,793 landmark pages, 138 country pages, every ranking, the statistics, the free-data page and the daily game. It is the sixth language, and the language switch now runs English → 日本語 → Deutsch → Español → Polski → Nederlands.
• What is genuinely Spanish is the landmark itself wherever Spanish Wikipedia has an article, 2,581 of them, 44.6% of the atlas and the best coverage after German: la Alhambra opens with the eswiki lead. The rest keep the English name and story, marked lang="en" and credited to the English Wikipedia by name. The 240 city day-trip guides, the statistics, data and about pages shipped in Spanish the same day: nothing quietly falls back to an English page.
• One Spanish fact is stored rather than guessed: which countries carry an obligatory article (en los Países Bajos, en la India, en el Líbano). Cities use their Spanish exonyms (Múnich, Viena, Varsovia), centuries are Roman (siglo XIII), and the interface is machine-authored pending a native review, which the Spanish footer says out loud.

30 July 2026: The little word English was missing too

• A day after German and Dutch got their articles, an audit caught English dropping its own: pages said “Castles in Czech Republic” and “in United States”. Seven of the atlas’s countries carry “the” in English (the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, the United States, the Philippines, the Dominican Republic, the United Arab Emirates and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, with “on” for the Isle of Man), and every title, heading, question and cross-link now says so. Three German lines had slipped through the same net (“Nr. 4 in Schweiz” on ranking cards and two FAQ answers); they use the German article table now, and a build test keeps every language honest at once.
• The categories then got the same treatment: 76 landmarks were filed under a chip their own sources contradict. 32 castles are now palaces (Rosenborg, Chapultepec, the Innsbruck Hofburg, Floors and a cluster of Hungarian mansions, all named “Castle” in English only because English has no word for a slott) the sources being the English lead’s own defining noun and, new today, Wikidata’s one-line description. 44 more are now ruins, largely on the Polish and Dutch Wikipedia leads, which state plainly (“– ruiny zamku”, “is de ruïne van”) what the English article never gets around to; Masada, Erebuni and Seoul’s two Baekje earthen fortresses joined by hand. Fortified country houses stay castles (Hever’s moat and portcullis, Appleby’s Norman keep, Broughton, Picton) each now pinned with its reason, and restored sites whose foreign lead is stale (Kaunas, the re-roofed Palace of the Porphyrogenitus) stay standing.
• Two forts moved to the country they stand in, per the atlas’s rule that attribution follows the ground: Fort Du Bus, an 1828 Dutch colonial fort in West Papua, is now under Indonesia, and Fort Piscadera under Curaçao (beside the island’s other forts, which were there all along).
• A Ukrainian fortress had been wearing the title of its Spanish Wikipedia article, disambiguator and all: “Fortaleza de San Pedro (Óblast de Járkov, Ucrania)” is now Fortress of Saint Peter, the 1770 stronghold of the Ukrainian Line. Its address stays what it was: renames never move a URL here.
• The previous changelog entry linked the MCP endpoint as if it were a page; clicking it served a bare API error. It reads as /mcp now: an address for machines, set like one.

29 July 2026: The little words German and Dutch were missing

• German and Dutch cannot drop the definite article the way this site did: it said “ist Chinesische Mauer” where a German reader expects die Chinesische Mauer. Which names take an article is not guessable (die Alhambra does, Schloss Neuschwanstein does not), so the atlas now reads it from the opening words of each landmark’s own German or Dutch Wikipedia article, where native editors wrote the name with its article in place. Where the article opens some other way, the name stays bare, exactly as before. Sentences that start with a landmark get the capitalised form: “Die Chinesische Mauer steht weltweit auf Platz 1.”
• The long ranking tables (all landmarks by fame, by age and the medieval list) now scroll properly on phones. Below tablet width the 5,793 rows lay out as compact blocks instead of a five-column table in a sideways scroller, and the browser skips the rows far off screen instead of drawing all of them at once.
• Every map landing and game page now ships a proper main heading for readers and crawlers that run no scripts: previously the heading only appeared once the interactive map loaded.

29 July 2026: Facts the atlas had outgrown

• Several sentences on this site named a landmark or a country in prose, and the data moved on without them. The homepage FAQ said the Palace of Versailles ranked #1; it has been second since the Chinese intake put the Great Wall of China above it. The statistics page said Scotland led the world in castles per head among countries of more than five million people; Slovakia does, with 23.3 per million, ahead of Ireland and Austria. The same page dated the atlas's oldest landmark to the 8th century BC, while the oldest list three clicks away had long since computed Aniba in Egypt, c. 3000 BC. All of these now read the answer off the data, so none of them can drift again.
• The fame ranking described its leader as "among the most-visited historic residences in the world": written when a palace led, and the Great Wall is nobody's residence. It also counted 192 "Wikipedia language editions", when 20 of those 192 are Wikivoyage, Wikiquote, Wikinews and Commons. Both are now stated the way the page's own table always had: Wikipedia editions and sister projects, plus the readership the article actually has.
• The about page said a landmark needs an article in "any of thirteen languages". That threshold moved to 22 editions in July and nobody updated the sentence; it now counts the editions that genuinely contribute, and so does the homepage. The oldest and oldest-by-country pages said founding years come from Wikidata alone, while their own body text explained (correctly) that the Wikipedia lead fills in where Wikidata is silent.
• The MCP server (/mcp), which answers questions from AI assistants, was describing an atlas of "2,400 castles across 131 countries" with Versailles at number one. It now reads all three from the dataset it serves, so a refresh can never leave it quoting the old one.
• Two league tables on the statistics page were quietly skipping fourteen countries that had crossed the ten-entry mark: Brazil, South Korea, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Taiwan and nine more. They are counted now, and a build warning fires the next time one goes missing.

28 July 2026: The atlas now reads Dutch

• Every page of this atlas now exists in Dutch at /nl/, all 5,793 landmark pages, 138 country pages, 240 day-trip city guides, every ranking, the statistics, the free-data page and the daily game. It is the fifth language beside English, German, Japanese and Polish, and it is a complete mirror: nothing quietly falls back to an English page.
• What is genuinely Dutch is the landmark itself where Dutch Wikipedia has an article: 1,616 of them, 28% of the atlas, and nearly every one a Dutch reader is likely to look up. Muiderslot opens with the nlwiki lead and is called Muiderslot, not Muiden Castle. The other 72% keep the English name and the English story, marked lang="en" so a screen reader does not read English prose with Dutch pronunciation, and credited to the English Wikipedia by name. That fallback never becomes the page description: where there is no Dutch article, the description is built from the data instead, in Dutch.
• Two bits of Dutch grammar are not derivable from a country name, so they are stored rather than guessed: islands take op and not in (op Malta, op Cyprus), and a handful of countries carry an article (in de Verenigde Staten, in de Filipijnen). Cities use their Dutch exonyms too: the day-trip guides are for Keulen, Wenen, Praag and Warschau.
• Two older bugs surfaced while wiring it up and are fixed for everyone: the fame-tier bands on the ranked page had a collapsed conditional that gave Polish and Japanese readers an English or bare label, and the Polish city pages lost the tail of their "see also" line, including two of its three links.

27 July 2026: “Some descriptions are very sparse”

• Laura Jenny reviewed this map for Bright and made one complaint: “Al zijn sommige omschrijvingen wel heel summier: van ‘gebouwd tijdens de Spaanse inquisitie’ tot ‘kasteel’.” Some descriptions are very sparse, from “built during the Spanish Inquisition” down to, simply, “castle”. She was right, and it was worse than she could see from the outside: 387 landmarks carried no description at all, and thousands more carried one that only repeated the labels printed beside it. Dublin Castle said “Castle”. The Grand Kremlin Palace said “Palace”.
• The landmark pages were never the problem: they have always opened with the Wikipedia article. It was the card on the map, which showed Wikidata’s one-line description and nothing else. So the card now falls back to the first sentence of the Wikipedia entry whenever that description is thin: Houska Castle reads “an early Gothic castle in the municipality of Blatce in the Liberec Region” instead of “Castle”. 3,234 landmarks gained a real sentence.
• A description is treated as thin when it is empty, very short, or only names the building type and the place: “Palace in Vienna, Austria” tells you nothing the chip and the country line above it have not already said. Where Wikidata writes something genuinely its own, it stays: the Alhambra keeps “Palace and fortress complex in Granada, Andalusia, Spain”.
• The second remark in the review (that zooming is occasionally awkward) is fair and still open.

27 July 2026: A Swedish manor house is not a castle

• Sweden had 89 castles on this map and 19 palaces. Among the castles were Tjolöholm, an Arts-and-Crafts country house finished in 1904, and a long row of Skåne manor houses whose own English Wikipedia articles open with the words “is a manor house”. 128 landmarks have moved to Palace & château, and Sweden now reads 62 castles to 46 palaces.
• The cause is a translation. Swedish slott, Danish slot, German Schloss, Czech zámek and French château all become “Castle” in an English title, because English has no separate word for a grand house that was never fortified. This map read the name before it read the building type, so every one of them arrived as a castle. The tell was in its own translations: the German edition calls the Palace category Schloss, so Schloss Hluboká on one page and Hluboká Castle on the other were the same building disagreeing with itself.
• The arbiter is now the Wikipedia opening line this site already prints on every landmark page: it was quoting “Tjolöholm Castle is a country house” three lines under a chip that said Castle. Where that line says manor house, country house, stately home or mansion, the building is a house, in any country. Where it says palace, château or residence the word settles nothing on its own (Windsor Castle “is a royal residence” and Chinon Castle “is a château”), so those need German Wikipedia, which does keep Burg and Schloss apart, to agree before anything moves.
• Beyond Sweden it lands hardest in France, Germany and Czechia. Brissac joins Chambord, Chenonceau and Cheverny, which were already filed as châteaux; Moritzburg, Hluboká and Orlík follow their own languages. So do Castle Howard, Dunrobin and Balmoral, where “Castle” in a British house name is a matter of status rather than architecture. Neuschwanstein moves too, which will look odd: it is the most-visited page on this site and the most famous castle in the world, and it is a palace (a historicist one, begun in 1869, with no defensive purpose whatever).
• A house built to look like a castle stays a castle. Peckforton is a Victorian country house “built in the style of a medieval castle”, and that is the point of it.
• Seven more landmarks became ruins: ones whose opening line defines them as remains or an archaeological site without ever using the word ruin, among them Leicester Castle and the Yoshinogari site.
• One boundary has deliberately not been touched. Castle and fortress are near-synonyms in English prose, and the same evidence would have moved Caernarfon, Conwy and Harlech out of Castle on the strength of a lead sentence that happens to say “fortification”. That is not a distinction a Wikipedia opening line can carry, so it was left alone.

27 July 2026: The Great Wall was missing

• China had eighteen landmarks on this map: fewer than Luxembourg, which is three thousand times smaller. It now has a hundred and twenty, and the Great Wall of China is among them. It is, by some distance, the most-read landmark in the whole atlas.
• The cause was not missing articles or missing photographs. It was that Wikidata does not file Chinese fortifications as castles: at this atlas’s admission bar the entire country holds three items typed that way. What it holds instead is 城墙 city walls, 城门 gates, 关 passes, 土楼 and 围屋 fortified clan houses, 炮台 batteries and Tibetan 宗, and every one of those classes is a sibling of the ones the map searched, never a subclass. So the search walked straight past them. The map now reads the class they all descend from, fortification, inside China.
• What that brings in: Jiayuguan and Juyongguan, the Great Wall’s own fortresses, which Wikidata files as mountain passes. Badaling, filed as a human settlement. Mutianyu, filed as a park. Simatai, Jinshanling, Jiankou and Huanghuacheng. The walls of Xi’an and of Nanjing, and Beijing’s surviving gates. The Old Summer Palace, burned in 1860 and never rebuilt, and Chengde, the Qing summer capital, both filed as gardens. The Silk Road’s abandoned cities: Jiaohe, Gaochang, Tongwan, Suoyang. The Fujian tulou and the Kaiping diaolou. The forts of Macau and Hong Kong.
• Zhonghua Gate in Nanjing deserves its own line. Four courtyards deep, with twenty-seven vaults that could hide three thousand soldiers, it is the most complex city gate ever built, and it carries no classification on Wikidata at all. Nothing about it is obscure; it simply had no type for a search to match.
• Not everything Wikidata calls a fortification belongs on a castle map, and the honest exclusions are worth stating: the fence along the North Korean border, the nuclear shelter under Beijing, a Cold War command tunnel, a working monastery and a single concrete pillbox beside a Shanghai road are all fortifications by classification, and none of them is here.
• Beyond China, the same refresh lifted the countries that were thinnest (Iran, Ukraine, Brazil, Turkey), and added the first landmarks in Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Bahamas. The atlas now holds 5,793 landmarks across 138 countries.
• This finishes something started on Hacker News, where shevy-java counted seven castles in the whole of China. Merging three duplicate country pages in July got that to seventeen, and it was fair to wonder whether the rest was ever coming. It was the classification all along.

26 July 2026: The atlas speaks Polish

• Polish joins English, German and Japanese as a full edition: the map, every castle page, all 131 countries, the 237 city guides, the rankings, the statistics and the changelog. Castle descriptions come from the Polish Wikipedia where it has an article.
• The language switcher now shows a flag rather than a two-letter code, which was cramped on a phone and unreadable on Windows, where emoji flags render as black rectangles: these are drawn as inline SVG instead.
• The rankings gained a second number. Alongside its place in the world, every landmark now shows where it stands inside its own country, on its page, on the hover card, on country pages and as a sortable column in the compare table. One shared ranking, in every language.

26 July 2026: Fort Delaware, from a comment thread

• A reader on Neatorama, Cluck2, wrote that the atlas was “missing data even when the data is part of the data set they claim to be using” and named Fort Delaware. They were right: it is typed a fort in Wikidata, it has a photograph and a coordinate, and it is read some sixteen thousand times a year; it was missing only because four Wikipedia editions cover it, and the atlas fills down to eight. The Civil War prison fort on Pea Patch Island is on the map now, dated 1859, the year its granite was finished.
• Its date needed a hand, too, and the fix is general: the year reader had taken “c. 1895” from the only date in its Wikipedia lead (a gun battery built inside the fort in the 1890s). A hand-verified year now also clears the “c.”, which it should always have done.

26 July 2026: Every page, all the way down in its own language

• This changelog is in Japanese now (all twenty-nine entries, not only the newest), and the Japanese page carries its own headings and date format. That is the visible half of a less visible fix: every ranking and list page was still printing castle names in English on the German and Japanese editions. The fame ranking, the oldest and medieval lists, the by-country pages, the big compare table and all the structured data behind them now read 姫路城 or Burg Himeji wherever the reader’s own Wikipedia has a name for it: about seventy-five places in the page builder had reached straight past the translation. Search still answers to either name.
• The 237 day-trip guides carry Japanese city names (京都市, ミュンヘン), and the map’s embed snippet now speaks the language of the page that copied it.
• And the daily game is trilingual: 城当てゲーム and Burg raten join Guess the Castle, with the hints, the board, the share text and the castle names in your own language. A Japanese player can type 姫路 and be understood: until now the name matcher threw away every non-Latin letter before it compared anything.

26 July 2026: Japan, counted the way Japan counts it

• A landmark enters this atlas when eight Wikipedia language editions cover it. That is a fair rule for a world map and a poor judge of Japan, where a castle can be famous for four hundred years and written up in exactly one language. s.ogawa named the measure that Japan actually uses: what a Japanese reader means by “castle” runs as far as 日本100名城 and 続日本100名城, the hundred castles the Japan Castle Foundation chose in 2006, and the further hundred it added in 2017. Both lists are now a source in their own right, read from Japanese Wikipedia’s own categories together with Wikidata’s membership statements, because neither is complete alone. 74 landmarks joined and Japan went from 155 to 229: among them Yonago, Naegi on its granite boulders, Tatsuoka, which is the only star fort in Japan besides Goryōkaku, Kaneda of 667 on Tsushima, the Yayoi ditches of Yoshinogari, and the Ainu chashi of the Nemuro Peninsula, which is number one on the list because the list is numbered from the north.
• The gap had exactly the shape they described. They were glad to find Hakodate’s Benten Daiba here (it is on neither list, and they could name the people who would object to it), while Shinoridate and Katsuyama-date, the two of southern Hokkaidō’s Twelve Mansions that the 2017 list does carry, were both missing. An atlas holding the arguable entry and not the canonical two has its rule wrong, not its data. Both are on the map now.
• Underneath, Japanese Wikipedia feeds the atlas’s data now and not only its translations. The sweep that admits a castle documented in German or Czech but not English runs over the Japanese edition too, and over two Wikidata classes that no query starting at “castle” could ever reach: Japanese castle and castle ruin in Japan are siblings of castle rather than subclasses (the same blind spot that hid 38 citadels until July). Where Wikidata held no coordinate, the Japanese article’s own map template gave one: Arikoyama, Kamaha, Hachimanyama, Shōzui and Genbao are placed from it. Where Wikidata held no photograph, Sugiyama arrived with the one at the head of its Japanese article. And Kaneyama in Mino was sitting on Naegi’s summit, forty kilometres east and accurate to the metre: a collision check on every intake is how that kind of error surfaces; its own article had it right.
• Two entries on the lists are still not here: the Shinagawa batteries in Tokyo Bay and 河後森城 Kagomiri Castle in Ehime. Every landmark on this map has a photograph, and no freely licensed photograph of either exists on Wikimedia Commons, which is where they stop, and where whoever uploads one puts them on the map at the next refresh. Three others needed the name the list uses rather than the one Wikidata carries: the Ashikaga clan residence and the Kitabatake clan residence are filed in Wikidata as the temple and the shrine standing on them today (it is their moats and earth ramparts that are protected, and an atlas that lists places of worship as castles is precisely what this one should not be), and Ōno Castle in Chikuzen, the 7th-century mountain fortress, shares its name with the Ōno Castle in Fukui that was already here.
• One more, and it is the question that started this: s.ogawa asked whether the Dōnan Twelve Garrisons were on the map, and they were not. Eleven of the twelve have no Wikidata entry at all, so eleven pins cannot exist, but the group has one, and the group is now a single pin: it stands at the centre of the six municipalities the garrisons were strung across, from Hakodate to Kaminokuni. Its picture is the map of where the twelve stood, English Wikipedia’s own, because no photograph of them exists on Commons except of Shinoridate, which is its own entry. The atlas stands at 3,812.
• One rule changed for Japan as a whole. English articles about Japanese castles state the condition in a sentence the atlas had not learned to read (“Its ruins have been protected as a National Historic Site since 1932”), and a 山城 that is stone bases and earthworks is a ruin under this atlas’s own rule, whatever it was built as. That moved twelve landmarks already on the map, Oka, Hachigata, Tokushima and Hachiōji among them, and settled the state of nineteen of the new arrivals. Two that the sentence would have caught are left alone: Gujō Hachiman and Sumoto both carry a 20th-century keep that their English articles never mention and their photographs are of.

24 July 2026: What counts as a castle: the rule, written down

• The most-repeated question in the Hacker News thread was never really about a missing castle: it was “what is your definition, and why is it applied so inconsistently?” The atlas had no answer anywhere on the site. It does now: the About page states the rule plainly. Castle & château is a fortified residence, fortress & fort is built for a garrison rather than a household, palace is a grand residence with no serious defensive purpose, and ruin is not a fourth kind of building but a state, which is the honest answer to why the Bastille and Fort Duquesne are filed as ruins with nothing left of either above ground. The page also gives the order the classifier actually works in (Wikipedia lead first, then the landmark’s own name, then Wikidata’s type, then the English description), and says which words stay ambiguous on purpose: château and Schloss mean castle in one valley and palace in the next. Thanks to Bedon292, relevant_stats, drstewart, dbspin, Svip, insane_dreamer and lo_zamoyski, who all asked the same question from different directions.
• Three North American forts the thread named and the atlas still lacked. Fort Pitt Blockhouse: 1764, the oldest building in Pittsburgh and the one piece of Fort Pitt still standing, asked for by someone who found only Fort Duquesne and pointed out its site holds no ruins to visit. Fort Wayne in Detroit, exactly the right catch: the atlas showed the vanished Fort Detroit but not the star fort downriver that is still there. And Fort Anne at Annapolis Royal, Canada’s oldest National Historic Site. All three had sat below the eight-language notability floor, which is precisely why the fame-ordered fill never reached them. Thanks to Brendinooo, garciansmith and yabones. The atlas stands at 3,737 landmarks.
• And the buttons on the map panel and in the daily game now press like the ones on every other page: their raised lip shrinks as the button sinks into it, instead of sliding down with it.

24 July 2026: A Japanese edition, and cleaner type

• The atlas now speaks Japanese. Every page (the map, all 3,700+ castle pages, the country and ranking pages) has a Japanese edition, with castle names and histories drawn from Japanese Wikipedia where they exist. All 155 Japanese castles, from Himeji to Osaka, read in native Japanese; landmarks without a Japanese article fall back to English. It joins the German edition: switch languages from the map or any page header.
• Headings across the whole site changed from a serif display face to the same clean sans-serif as the body text: one modern, legible typeface everywhere, matching the Japanese pages’ gothic, and one fewer web font to download.
• On phones the map header was rebuilt: the title, a language switch and a light/dark toggle now sit as compact, equal-height controls instead of crowding into a single bar.

23 July 2026: Castles near you: day-trip guides for 237 cities

• The atlas can now answer the question people actually ask: what castles are near me? 237 city guides (from London and Munich to Kyoto and Jaipur) each listing every landmark within 100 km of the city centre: the closest, the most famous, the oldest, and all the rest in day-trip bands, each with its straight-line distance and compass direction. Border cities show their whole circle honestly: Basel’s reaches into three countries.
• Everything is computed, nothing is written by hand: the cities come from Wikidata (population, coordinates, German exonyms), the castles from the atlas itself, and a city qualifies by having at least seven landmarks in day-trip range, so as the atlas grows, new cities earn their guide automatically. The guides exist in German too, and every country page now links its cities’ guides.
• One departure the new Munich guide made visible: the Braunes Haus (the demolished NSDAP headquarters, which Wikidata types as a palace) is gone, under the same rule that removed the Grafeneck and Hartheim memorial sites.
• A reader in Warsaw caught the atlas showing two buildings that are not there. The Saxon Palace and Brühl Palace were blown up by German troops in December 1944 (of the Saxon Palace only the colonnade sheltering the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier still stands), and both were drawn as ordinary standing palaces. They are marked as ruins now, the same way the Bastille and the Tuileries are. Reconstruction of both is under way and due around 2030; when they stand again, so will their pins. Thanks to I claim sanctuary.
• The same reader asked the sharper question: “even the giant Warsaw Citadel is missing… wonder what was the query?” The query was the problem. The atlas searches Wikidata’s castle, fortress, fort, château and palace classes, and citadel is none of them: it is a sibling class, not a subclass, so every landmark filed only as a citadel was invisible no matter how famous. Of the 93 citadels that meet the atlas’s bar, 38 were missing. That hole is closed, and it was a big one: Arg-e Bam, the largest adobe building on earth; the Citadelle Laferrière, the largest fortress in the Americas; the Citadel of Erbil, on a mound inhabited for six thousand years; Vietnam’s two UNESCO citadels at Tây Đô and Thăng Long; Berlin’s Spandau Citadel; Naryn-Kala above Derbent; the citadels of Namur, Qaitbay, Ghazni, Făgăraș and Erfurt, and the Tower of David at the Jaffa Gate in Jerusalem. And, at last, the Warsaw Citadel (beside Modlin, whose presence made the gap so glaring) together with the Przemyśl Fortress, the great siege of the Eastern Front.
• Another reader found the atlas listing the Schlosshotel in Kronberg but not the actual castle in Kronberg. Exactly right, and an honest explanation: a landmark needs eight Wikipedia language editions to earn a place, and Burg Kronberg has six while the Schlosshotel down the hill has seventeen. Fame is not the same as importance; the castle is on the map now. Thanks to scorbet.
• Two records were also refiled by where the landmark actually stands rather than by the country field Wikidata ranks highest. Ateret Fortress, the Crusader castle at Jacob’s Ford on the Jordan, was listed under Palestine because its country value points at the historic region of that name rather than any modern state: the same slip that once put a castle in the “Kingdom of England”. It stands in the Upper Galilee, and it is filed under Israel now, as is the Tower of David inside Jerusalem’s Old City walls, alongside the Antonia Fortress 750 metres away.
• And one reader admitted the first thing they did was check for Fort Chambly. It was not there: it sat exactly on the notability line and fell off the end of a query. It is there now. Thanks to Francois Dejeuner. With 25 arrivals, the atlas stands at 3,733 landmarks.
• And the homepage is now just the map, on every screen. The long about-section that used to sit below it (browse links, FAQ, the how-it’s-built story) no longer renders; phones never showed it, and now nobody scrolls. The text stays in the page for search engines, and everything it linked is one click away in the map’s panel: all castles, the fame ranking, how it’s built.
• Every button is a proper button now, and it presses. The controls on the map panel, in the game and across the page headers became solid teal with bold cream text, each sitting on a raised lip: hover and it nudges down, click and it sinks flush into its shadow. It is the tactile button from our sister atlas TrainRouter, in the house palette: one button language everywhere.
• The browse page got a search bar: type a name or a country on the all-castles page and the 3,733 cards filter as you type (accents optional, so “chateau” finds the Château de Chambord). Collapsed sections open themselves while you search and step aside when they hold no matches.
• A second founding-date pass: 320 more landmarks now carry the date their own Wikipedia article states, 129 precise (“built between 1813 and 1821”), 191 approximate (“a 12th-century castle”, shown as “c.”). The reader learned new idioms (year ranges, “the 790s”, “early” and “late” centuries), and it now reads German leads too, which dated 116 landmarks that have no English article, Masada (c. 37 BC), the Palace of Aachen (c. 795) and Eltz Castle (c. 12th century) among them. 71% of the atlas is dated now, up from 62%, and the 1,090 landmarks whose articles state no date stay honestly undated.

22 July 2026: The castle on the 1-cent coin: a third wave from the thread

• Italy’s most embarrassing absence is fixed: Castel del Monte (Frederick II’s octagonal crown, a UNESCO site, the castle on Italy’s 1-cent coin) was invisible to the atlas because Wikidata now types it as a set of museum classes, not a castle; no castle query could ever find it. It is joined by its Hohenstaufen kin Castello Svevo in Bari, the sea-front castle of Trani and the Norman castle of Gioia del Colle, plus Lerici Castle on the Gulf of Poets and Santa Severa Castle: the very item one reader looked up on Wikidata and wondered about. Thanks to _ZeD_, deppep, ipunchghosts and riffraff.
• Africa grew where a reader showed us it should: Lamu Fort and the UNESCO dry-stone enclosures of Thimlich Ohinga join Fort Jesus in Kenya (the Old Fort of Zanzibar and the fortress of São Miguel in Luanda were already on the map). And Jordan gains Machaerus, Herod’s hilltop fortress over the Dead Sea. One honest limit: Somalia’s Dervish forts at Taleh have no usable Wikidata item yet (improving them there is the way in). Thanks to uxhacker and aorth.
• The Citadel of Acre was hiding in plain sight. We first reported it had no usable Wikidata item, wrong: Acre is a castle city, and its citadel is filed under the scholarly label “Hospitaller commandery of Saint-Jean-d’Acre” (the German Wikipedia calls it plainly the Zitadelle), which no citadel-shaped search ever finds. The stronghold of the city Napoleon failed to take in 1799 is on the map now. Thanks to dmblit.
• The Palmerston Forts exist here now: Fort Nelson on Portsdown Hill, the three Solent sea forts (Spitbank, No Man’s Land and Horse Sand), Fort Brockhurst in Gosport, and Plymouth’s Crownhill Fort. Thanks to hermitcrab and CrzyLngPwd.
• Three more by request: Vanbrugh Castle, the playwright-architect’s own “Bastille” in Greenwich; Fort Vasquez, the rebuilt adobe fur-trading fort in Colorado; and Fort Knox: the granite one in Maine, the first fort to carry the famous name and, unlike the Kentucky army post, an actual visitable fortress. Thanks to philipwhiuk, Stealthisbook, modeless and the111.
• One departure: Ljubljana’s National Assembly Building (a working 1959 parliament that Wikidata types as a “palace”) is gone, under the same rule that removed the North Carolina State Capitol. The atlas stands at 3,709 landmarks. Thanks to ajsnigrutin.
• And the hover card stopped running away: it used to follow the cursor, so chasing its links could feel like a duel. It now anchors once, at the castle’s own dot, and stays put while you reach it. Thanks to drcongo.

22 July 2026: Browse with pictures, and 210 truer ruins

• The all-castles page and every country page are picture browsers now: each landmark as a card with its photo, century, fame rank and a one-sentence story, most famous first (the same format as our sister atlas’s route browser).
• Ruin detection got sharper, in four passes: the last one auditing Wikidata’s own ruin typing for every landmark. The classifier now reads the freshly fetched Wikipedia leads (including German Wikipedia for landmarks that have no English article), and also recognises destroyed and damaged sites: leads that define a site by its remains, narrate destruction that was never rebuilt, or describe a derelict state. 210 landmarks moved to Ruins (472 → 682), the last pass reading the condition wherever the lead states it (often the second or third sentence) plus a hand-audit of vanished sites like Nonsuch and Richmond Palace, from Slovak and Polish hilltop castles to vanished Dutch castles and Madrid’s Buen Retiro. Every pattern is guarded against the “destroyed… then rebuilt” trap, and English Wikipedia stays authoritative where it exists: German Wikipedia calls even well-preserved roofless castles like Caernarfon a “Burgruine”.

22 July 2026: The atlas now reads Wikipedia in thirteen languages: 1,255 new landmarks

• The sharpest criticism in the Hacker News thread was aimed exactly right: requiring an English Wikipedia article kept whole regions off the map; a Burg documented only on German Wikipedia, or a castello only on Italian, could never enter. The atlas now sweeps twelve more editions (German, French, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Romanian, Hungarian, Portuguese, Dutch and Greek) alongside English, and stands at 3,693 landmarks across 131 countries. Every entry still needs a real photo, a Wikipedia article and exact coordinates. Thanks to pmontra, superhuzza and Bedon292 for pinpointing the cause.
• The regions the thread called out all grew: Italy 179 → 288, France 183 → 276, Spain 88 → 181 (Castilla y León very much included), Poland 77 → 163, Germany 176 → 254, Switzerland 27 → 91, Austria 68 → 133, Portugal 22 → 82, the Netherlands 22 → 76, Romania 19 → 74 and Hungary 13 → 64, with Czechia, Slovakia and Greece close behind, and Australia finally has its dot: Fort Denison, in Sydney Harbour. Thanks to ainiriand, mxfh, stefanka, AStrangeMorrow, notorandit, ipunchghosts, weezing, limaoscarjuliet, cozzyd, comrade1234, hurghada, metada5e, andsoitis and busymom0.
• 285 of the additions are documented only in a non-English edition, and their pages say so plainly: the Wikipedia link is labelled with its language (“in German”), the English-readership half of the fame score honestly counts them at zero (so they enter as hidden gems), and the how-to-add-a-castle guidance now accepts an article in any major language.

22 July 2026: Eleven landmarks you asked for by name, and cleaner data behind them

• On the map now: the Acropolis of Athens (the ancient citadel itself), Caisteal Maol on Skye, Boldt Castle in the Thousand Islands, Jim Bishop’s Bishop Castle in Colorado (removed again on 2026-08-08, see that day’s entry), Fort Point under the Golden Gate Bridge, the Dover Western Heights, the Esslinger Burg, and four Romanian strongholds, the Fortress of Arad, Oradea Citadel, Râșnov Citadel and Rupea Citadel. Thanks to YeGoblynQueenne, 00deadbeef, etimberg, Stealthisbook, shagie, mr_toad, frm88 and rob74.
• Hama-rikyū Gardens left the atlas: it is a Tokyo garden (its palace burned in 1724 and was never rebuilt). Thanks to throwaway2037.
• Elmina Castle’s fame was broken by a data gap: its readership had never been fetched, so the oldest and largest European building in sub-Saharan Africa sat a tier below its neighbour Cape Coast Castle. Fixed, with some 74,000 yearly readers and 35 language editions, Elmina now ranks where it belongs. Thanks to prmph.
• China is one country page now, not three: “People’s Republic of China”, “China” and “Tibet” each carried separate entries, which is why the map seemed to show almost no Chinese landmarks; all 17, from the Forbidden City to the Potala Palace, now live under China. The Potocki Palace in Lviv, filed under “Austria–Hungary”, sits correctly under Ukraine. Thanks to shevy-java.

22 July 2026: Approximate dates join the age rankings, wearing their “c.”

• Until today a landmark dated “13th century” was excluded from the oldest-castles ranking so an approximation could never pose as precise. That was honest but too timid: it silently hid genuinely ancient sites. Approximate dates now rank everywhere: oldest, medieval, oldest in every country, the statistics and the big compare table (always marked “c.”, and sorting after precisely dated sites at the same year). 145 approximately dated landmarks join the lists.
• The same pass fixed an inconsistency: country pages already used approximate years in their “oldest landmark” lines but displayed them bare, as if precise. Every year shown anywhere now carries its “c.” when it is one.

22 July 2026: Map polish from the thread: hover cards you can click into, colours told apart

• The hover card’s links were unreachable: the card vanished the moment the cursor left the dot. It now waits: a short grace period, and the card holds itself open while your pointer is over it, so “Full story” and Wikipedia are one hover and a click away. Thanks to bwhiting2356.
• Ruins are heather-violet now. The old slate blue sat too close to both the castle cream and the palace teal at dot size: the four categories finally read apart at a glance. And card photos keep their own aspect ratio (up to a cap) instead of a fixed crop that could hide the castle itself: Bamburgh no longer vanishes behind its dune. Thanks to 00deadbeef.
• Cards can no longer be cut off by the map’s edge: a card taller than the frame allows now scrolls within it, and it opens on whichever side of its dot has more room, so “Full story” and Wikipedia are always reachable.

22 July 2026: Founding years for hundreds more castles

• Wikidata leaves about 40% of the atlas without a founding year. Where a landmark’s Wikipedia lead states when it was built, that year is now read in: 316 more castles are dated, bringing the atlas to roughly three-quarters. Only a date the source actually states is used; the rest stay undated rather than guessed.
• Century-level or hedged dates (a “13th-century castle”, “around 1240”) show a “c.” and are kept out of the oldest-castle rankings so an approximation never poses as a precise date. The map’s year slider now covers most of the atlas, and the open dataset gains a year_approx flag.

22 July 2026: More from the Hacker News thread: five castles added, the data sharpened

• Five castles you told us were missing are on the map now: Hearst Castle in California, Toronto’s Casa Loma, the Citadelle of Québec and the Halifax Citadel, and Larnach Castle (New Zealand’s only castle, which brings the atlas to 130 countries). Thanks to makeusgreat, guyzero, yabones and kinow.
• Two entries that aren’t castles are gone: the North Carolina State Capitol (a working government building) and Porto’s Palácio da Bolsa (a 19th-century stock exchange, never a fortification). Thanks to allturtles and jcfariadias.
• The Bastille, the Château de Saint-Cloud, Fort Detroit and Fort Duquesne (landmarks that no longer stand) are all filed under Ruins (Fort Detroit had been mislabelled a standing fortress). Thanks to dolmen, mr_toad, garciansmith and Brendinooo.
• Clarence House (a working royal residence rather than a famous palace) left the top-ranked tier; its fame score had leaned on royal-news readership rather than architectural stature. Thanks to jameshart.
• A reminder made clearer on the map itself: this is a curated atlas of the most notable castles, not an exhaustive list, so the map now reads “notable landmarks”, and the homepage FAQ explains how the set is chosen and how to add a castle through Wikidata. Thanks to mxfh.

22 July 2026: Phone taps, fixed: thank you, Hacker News

• On a phone, tapping a castle now opens its card and keeps its links working. The “Full story” and Wikipedia links used to do nothing on mobile: a tap was read as a hover and closed the card instead of opening it. Reported by samfar90 and BasieP2.
• Where dots crowd together, a tap now picks the nearest castle rather than whatever happened to sit on top, so you no longer have to zoom right in to hit the one you meant. Thanks to prmph.

21 July 2026: Medieval castles, on their own map

• New page: the medieval castles of the world, every landmark in the atlas with a documented founding year in the Middle Ages, roughly 500 to 1500, the most famous first and then the full chronological table. It sits next to Oldest on the rankings hub.
• It is the cut a plain “castle” search never gives you: the ancient citadels drop out below 500, and the 19th-century revival palaces (Neuschwanstein and its lookalikes) drop out above 1500, by founding year rather than by looks. Dates come from Wikidata (P571); undated sites are left out, not guessed.

20 July 2026: Every category gets its oldest

• The oldest-castles ranking now crowns each category separately: the ten oldest castles, fortresses, palaces and ruins, each in its own anchored section; Nero’s Domus Aurea (AD 64) leads the palaces, Zerzevan (c. 400) the ruins.
• And a new page alongside it: the oldest castle in every country (one national champion per country, oldest first, with the full alphabetical table). The by-age twin of most famous by country.
• The fame ranking got the same treatment: the ten most famous castles, fortresses, palaces and ruins, each anchored. And everything now lives together on one hub (Rankings, in the menu), six views: fame and age; world, country and category.
• The hub’s centrepiece: one sortable table of all 2,435 landmarks (name, country, category, founding year, fame rank, Wikipedia editions and yearly readers). Click any column to sort it your way, click again to flip, and type to filter by castle or country. No framework, no tracking: a two-kilobyte script on otherwise static HTML.

19 July 2026: The oldest castles, ranked, and 27 dates set straight

• New page: the oldest castles in the world, every landmark with a documented founding year, ranked oldest-first, from the Bronze-Age Avranlo Fortress and the 8th-century-BC Erebuni to the present. It sits next to Ranked in the menu.
• Building it exposed 26 Wikidata founding years that were really renovation or heritage-designation dates: the Tang-dynasty Daming Palace claimed 2010, Chapultepec 1944, Sanok 2010. All corrected to the documented construction start, and Erebuni Fortress now correctly sits under Armenia rather than the long-gone kingdom of Urartu: the atlas spans 129 countries.
• England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland now show their ENG/SCT/WLS/NIR codes everywhere instead of emoji flags that rendered as a plain black flag on Windows.

19 July 2026: Room to breathe: pages run wide now

• Every content page widened from a 928 px shell to 1,280 px, the same footprint as our newest atlases. Paragraphs keep their readable measure: it’s the country grids, fact panels, ranking tables and castle photos that use the new room.

19 July 2026: Ruins mean ruins: the state now beats the type

• A follow-up to today’s label fixes: 142 more landmarks that Wikipedia itself defines as ruins now carry the Ruin chip, Heidelberg (“is a ruin… landmark of Heidelberg”), Vlad the Impaler’s Poenari, Alamut, the Cathar Peyrepertuse, Tantallon and much of the great Slovak and Czech hilltop family (Čachtice, Trosky…). Ruins grew from 119 to 261.
• The rule reads each monument’s own English Wikipedia lead, with guards: “built on the ruins of” doesn’t count, “semi-ruined” doesn’t either, and rebuilt sites the text can’t catch (Kokořín, Nassau, Kosava, Nyköpingshus) are pinned by hand to stay castles.
• The atlas now counts 1,031 castles, 427 fortresses, 716 palaces and 261 ruins; the map filter, legend, statistics and the open dataset follow.

19 July 2026: Fortresses are fortresses again: 83 labels corrected

• Wikidata often types a fortress as a “castle”, and the atlas used to trust that typing over the monument’s own name, so Kufstein Fortress wore a castle chip. The categoriser now lets an unambiguous name win: 68 landmarks became fortresses (from Hohensalzburg and the Citadel of Aleppo to the Château d’If, a fortress despite the château, and the Moscow Kremlin), and 15 became palaces (the Hofburg, Scone Palace).
• Names only rule where they are unambiguous; a French château or a German Schloss can be castle or palace, so there Wikidata’s building types still decide, and hand-checked exceptions cover oddities like the Kremlin Senate: a palace inside a fortress.
• The map’s category filter, the legend, every page label and the open dataset follow along: the atlas now counts 1,152 castles, 441 fortresses, 723 palaces and 119 ruins.

19 July 2026: Reader requests: Norway and India grow

• Four Norwegian fortresses joined the atlas after @42@snabelen.no pointed out on Mastodon that they were missing: Kongsvinger, the fortified old town of Fredrikstad, Tønsberg Fortress above Norway’s oldest town, and Oscarsborg, whose guns sank the cruiser Blücher in April 1940. Thank you!
• India grew from 71 to 80 landmarks after @vibhurishi@social.linux.pizza noted the country was thin, closing some conspicuous gaps: Golconda, Delhi’s Purana Qila, Kalinjar, Bidar, Chitradurga, Warangal, the City Palace in Jaipur, Ujjayanta Palace and the wooden Padmanabhapuram Palace, and yes, Ranthambore Fort was already on the map.
• The same data refresh brought 22 further castle ruins worldwide, and the Imperial City of Huế is now correctly listed under Vietnam. The atlas stands at 2,435 landmarks in 130 countries.

18 July 2026: Guess the Castle: a daily game

• The atlas learned to play: Guess the Castle shows one castle photo a day (drawn from the 500 most famous), and gives you six guesses. Every miss zooms the photo out and answers with the distance and compass direction from your guess to the answer, because every guess is a real castle on the map.
• Streaks and stats live in your browser only (no account, like everything here), and the result copies as a spoiler-free emoji grid.
• The answer links straight to the castle’s page and its spot on the night map: the game is a door into the atlas, not a detour from it.

18 July 2026: “Ink & Bone”: a calmer, more human look

• The whole site moved from the launch palette (dark navy + amber gold) to ink, bone and verdigris: closer to an antique sea-chart. The honest reason: readers whose taste we respect said the old colours looked machine-made. Matt Muir in Web Curios put it with the most style: lose “the horrible orange/brown look”, gain “some vague semblance of humanity”. He had a point.
• New favicon and social-share card to match, rendered from the live dataset.
• This changelog page, with an Atom feed at /changelog/feed.xml.
• The all-castles index was rebuilt for scanning: a country grid with flags in place of a run-on link wall, columned category lists, and an on-page contents line.
• The same treatment for castles by country and tidier action rows on the ranking pages, and on the map itself, “All 2,400 castles” is now a proper button, so the browsable atlas is one obvious click away.
• The display face changed from Cormorant Garamond to Fraunces (a warmer, wonkier old-style serif) completing the redesign the palette began: headers on every page, the map included, now carry it.
• The site header gained the castle mark, the wordmark settled on a single colour, and the content pages grew wider: prose keeps its reading measure while grids and tables breathe.
• Country chips now set a deliberate country code (ENG, SCT, WLS and NIR included) instead of emoji flags, which rendered differently on every platform, and the Netherlands got its missing NL back.
• The map panel slimmed from five controls to three buttons (Browse, About and Surprise me), and the atlas gained a proper about page: what it is, how it is built, who keeps it. The region quick-jump row went too; the map itself is the region picker.
• The map loads faster: the castle data now travels beside the app instead of inside it, the code download halved, data and code arrive in parallel, and each is cached independently.

15 July 2026: Honest sitemap dates

• The sitemap now re-dates a page only when its content has actually changed, instead of stamping every page on every deploy: kinder to crawlers, truer to the word “lastmod”.

14 July 2026: German edition, phone ergonomics, a data fix

• Full German mirror at /de/: the map UI and all 2,400 castle pages, with German Wikipedia content where it exists (about 84% of landmarks).
• Proper iPhone / touch ergonomics across the map and every page: safe-area insets, bigger tap targets.
• Data correction: Jaigarh Fort’s founding year (1726, Wikidata carried −1000), plus an override list so future data refreshes keep audited fixes.

13 July 2026: The most famous castle in every country

• New page: one national champion per country, ranked by fame. The Palace of Versailles comes out world #1; the 131 champions span fame ranks #1 to #2,120.

12 July 2026: Statistics, embeds and an MCP server

• /statistics/, citable castle statistics computed from the dataset: country league tables, density and per-capita leaders, founding centuries.
• An embeddable, chromeless version of the map at /embed/, free to put on any site.
• An MCP server at /mcp, listed in the official MCP Registry: AI assistants can query the atlas live.
• The dataset mirrored to GitHub, Hugging Face and Kaggle, and made citable with a Zenodo DOI.
• Unknown URLs now return a real 404 instead of the map shell.

11 July 2026: Stories, fame and free data

• Every castle page gained its story: the lead of its Wikipedia article, with attribution.
• A fame ranking of all 2,400 landmarks at /castles/ranked/, blending Wikipedia coverage with real readership.
• The free dataset page at /data/: GeoJSON and CSV, CC0.

10 July 2026: 2,400 landmarks across 131 countries

• The atlas grew from its launch size to 2,400 castles, fortresses and palaces: Japan fixed, the UK split into its four nations, and a Ruins category (97) added.

9 July 2026: Launch

• Castlemap goes live: the world’s great castles, fortresses and palaces on one interactive night map, each with a photo, founding century and its own page.