The atlas
About the Castle Map
A free interactive night map of the world's great castles, fortresses and palaces — 5793 landmarks across 138 countries, each with its photo, founding century and story. No ads, no accounts.
How it is made
Everything on this map comes from open data: facts, coordinates and founding dates from Wikidata, photographs from Wikimedia Commons, stories from Wikipedia, and the night basemap from OpenFreeMap and Natural Earth. The atlas is curated, not exhaustive: the 5793 most significant landmarks worldwide, ordered by a fame ranking that blends Wikipedia coverage with real readership.
Missing a castle, or spotted a wrong date? The best route is improving its Wikidata entry — well-documented sites join the atlas at the next refresh, and the correction helps everyone else who uses the same open data.
What counts as a castle
No single definition satisfies everyone: a Burg, a château, a star fort and a Mughal palace are not the same kind of building, and every country draws the line differently. Rather than adopt one national definition, the atlas sorts each landmark into four plain categories — and this is the rule it uses.
Castle & château — a fortified residence: someone lived there, and it was built to be held. Fortress & fort — built for a garrison rather than a household: citadels, star forts, coastal batteries. Palace & residence — a grand residence with no serious defensive purpose. Ruin is not a fourth kind of building but a state: any of the other three that no longer stands as it was, including sites that have vanished completely — which is why the Bastille and Fort Duquesne are filed as ruins even though nothing of either remains above ground.
The classification is mechanical, in this order. A Wikipedia lead that describes remains or an unrepaired destruction makes it a ruin. Otherwise an unambiguous word in the landmark’s own name wins — “Kufstein Fortress” is a fortress whatever Wikidata types it. Otherwise Wikidata’s own type decides, then the English description. Genuinely ambiguous words stay ambiguous: château and Schloss mean castle in one valley and palace in the next, and here they lean palace.
Inclusion is a separate question from classification. A landmark needs a real photograph, exact coordinates and a Wikipedia article — in English or any of the 21 other editions the atlas reads — plus enough Wikipedia editions to show it is documented rather than merely listed. That bar is why this is a curated 5793 and not the hundreds of thousands of fortified structures that exist; France alone has tens of thousands. Falling below it is not a verdict on a castle’s importance, only on how well the open data describes it so far.
One route past that bar: a list drawn by a national authority on castles. Japan’s 100 Famous Castles and Continued 100 Famous Castles, chosen by the Japan Castle Foundation in 2006 and 2017, admit every landmark on them however few Wikipedia editions cover it — because a fame ranking built on Wikipedia is a poor judge of a country whose castles are written up in one language. The lists are read from Japanese Wikipedia’s own categories. Other countries with a comparable list can join them; tell us about one.
Who keeps it
The atlas is run by one person, building in the open — AI does much of the heavy lifting, a human decides what ships. Every user-visible change lands in the changelog (with an Atom feed).
Everything is open
The full dataset is free to download (GeoJSON and CSV, CC0, citable via DOI). The statistics page computes it through, an MCP server at thecastlemap.com/mcp answers live queries from AI assistants, and the map itself is free to embed.
Sister atlases from the same workshop: TrainRouter, Sunshine Atlas, Beachmap, Detourmap and FilmMap.