Open data
The castle dataset, free to download
9,079 castles, fortresses, palaces and ruins across 155 countries — the exact dataset behind the interactive map.
Every landmark is curated from Wikidata and verified to have exact coordinates, a real Wikimedia Commons photo and a Wikipedia article. The facts are CC0 — use them for anything, no permission needed. A link back to Castle Map is appreciated but not required. Photos and Wikipedia texts are not part of the download; they remain under their own Commons/Wikipedia licenses.
Fields
- qid
- Wikidata item ID (e.g. Q4152) — join key to the whole Wikidata graph
- name
- Landmark name (English where available)
- category
- castle · fortress · palace · ruin
- country / iso
- Country name and ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code (England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland carry ISO 3166-2 codes: GB-ENG, GB-SCT, GB-WLS, GB-NIR)
- lat / lon
- WGS84 coordinates
- year / century
- Founding year (negative = BC) and century label
- wikipedia
- Wikipedia article URL (English where it exists, else the native edition)
- image
- Wikimedia Commons photo URL (1280px)
- sitelinks
- Wikimedia sitelink count — language Wikipedias + sister projects (the coverage signal)
- pageviews
- Wikipedia pageviews over the last 60 days, summed across the largest language editions, real users (the readership signal)
- fame_rank
- Global fame rank (1 = most famous), blending sitelinks and pageviews
- url
- The landmark’s page on this atlas
- year_approx
- 1 / true when the year is approximate — a century-level or hedged date, shown as “c.” on the site
- image_by
- The photographer or uploader credited on Wikimedia Commons — most licences require naming them when the picture is reused
- image_licence
- The photo’s licence on Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0, CC0, public domain …)
The sitelinks, pageviews and fame_rank columns power the castle fame ranking, where the method is explained in full. For what the dataset says about the world — country league tables, per-capita leaders, founding centuries — see the castle statistics.
Spot an error or a missing castle? Improve its Wikidata entry — the dataset and map refresh from Wikidata, and your fix helps every project built on open data.
Mirrors: the dataset also lives on GitHub, Hugging Face and Kaggle, and is citable via DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21322359 (Zenodo archive of each release).
Query it live — MCP server
For AI agents and assistants, the dataset is also a remote Model Context Protocol server: point any MCP client at https://thecastlemap.com/mcp (streamable HTTP, no key, read-only). Tools: search_castles, get_castle, castles_near, top_castles, list_countries, random_castle, get_statistics.
Embed the map
Put the live interactive map on your own site — free, no key, no tracking. Deep links work too: /embed/?country=france or /embed/?castle=palace-of-versailles start the map there.
<iframe src="https://thecastlemap.com/embed/" width="100%" height="480" style="border:0;border-radius:12px" loading="lazy" allowfullscreen title="Castle Map — the world's great castles on one interactive map"></iframe>
<p style="margin:4px 0 0;font-size:13px">Map: <a href="https://thecastlemap.com/">Castle Map — the world's great castles, on one map</a></p>