Nouveautés

Nouveautés sur Castlemap

Un petit atlas, tenu honnêtement : chaque changement visible atterrit ici, le plus récent d’abord. Il est fait par une seule personne, au grand jour — l’IA fait une grande part du gros œuvre, un humain décide de ce qui se publie. Les corrections sont les bienvenues.

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13 septembre 2026 — Une carte plus rapide : le survol, l’épinglage et les premières secondes

• Survoler ou épingler un château ne fait plus accrocher la carte. Chaque fois que le pointeur croisait un point, la carte réorganisait les 8 134 points pour dessiner la mise en évidence. Le château mis en évidence occupe désormais une petite couche à lui, les autres s’estompent simplement, et le point sous le pointeur est trouvé dans une table de correspondance plutôt qu’en testant chaque cercle à l’écran. La fiche ne saute plus à l’arrivée de sa photo, et elle suit le pointeur sans l’effet de verre dépoli qui la faisait saccader sur les machines plus lentes.
• La carte apparaît plus tôt. Elle attendait un seul gros fichier avant de dessiner le premier point. Ce dont un point a besoin, sa position, son type, son année et sa notoriété, arrive désormais en premier, au tiers de la taille ; les photos, les récits et les liens vers les articles suivent un instant plus tard, avant que vous ayez survolé quoi que ce soit. CastleGuessr, qui a besoin des photos tout de suite, charge les deux parties ensemble comme avant.
• Cadrer un pays sur un grand écran ne cache plus ses châteaux les plus à l’ouest sous le panneau. Le cadre était dimensionné pour le panneau plus étroit des petits écrans.

12 septembre 2026 — Une recherche qui fonctionne sur mobile, et un drapeau sur le bouton de langue

• La recherche sur mobile ne zoome plus la page. Sur iPhone, toucher la recherche de châteaux du panneau agrandissait toute la carte, qui restait agrandie une fois le clavier refermé. Le champ de recherche a désormais une taille de texte que les téléphones laissent telle quelle, choisir un résultat referme aussitôt le clavier et le panneau, et les résultats se touchent plus facilement.
• Sur mobile, le bouton de langue affiche désormais le drapeau de la langue dans laquelle vous lisez. Il montrait auparavant un globe, et la liste des drapeaux qu’il ouvre dépassait du bord de l’écran ; elle tient désormais, en deux rangées de quatre, sur la carte et dans CastleGuessr.

12 septembre 2026 — La presse en logos, en tête de la page À propos

• La page À propos s’ouvre désormais sur la presse, en logos. Le Figaro, BILD, Ouest-France, Euronews, The Verge et les autres y figurent par leur logo, repris de Wikimedia Commons lorsqu’il en existe une version libre ; les titres qui n’en ont pas sont composés en texte. La liste complète, avec un lien vers chaque article, se trouve un clic plus bas. Dix-neuf articles qui n’y figuraient pas la rejoignent, dont Ouest-France, BILD, TRAVELBOOK et The Verge, ainsi qu’un fil r/MapPorn, la Wikidata Weekly Summary, weeklyOSM et PAX d’Artribune. Comme avant, rien de tout cela n’a été payé ni sollicité.

11 septembre 2026 — Une façon de soutenir l’atlas

• L’atlas a un bouton de don. Il se trouve sur la page À propos, un lien y mène depuis le pied de chaque page, et une petite note le propose lors de votre première visite, puis de nouveau si vous revenez au moins quatre heures plus tard. Il ouvre la page de don de PayPal elle-même ; rien de PayPal ne se charge sur ce site. L’atlas reste gratuit, sans publicité et sans compte.
• Les liens vers les atlas frères, dans le panneau de la carte, correspondent désormais aux pieds de page. L’atlas des plages en est sorti le 7 septembre ; le panneau l’avait gardé par erreur jusqu’ici.

11 septembre 2026 — Quatre lieux demandés par des lecteurs rejoignent la carte, et Fort Conger la quitte

• Trois demandes sont arrivées par courriel, de ceux qui en prennent soin. Un guide du château de Logne, en province de Liège, a demandé s’il pouvait figurer sur la carte : la place forte des princes-abbés de Stavelot, bâtie au début du XIIe siècle sur un éperon rocheux dominant l’Ourthe et détruite en 1521, y est désormais classée parmi les ruines. L’équipe du palais de Snov, en Biélorussie, palais classique et parc paysager de la famille Rdułtowski, a écrit la même semaine, tout comme la famille propriétaire du château de Poudenas, en Gascogne, un château du XIIIe siècle ouvert au XVIIe par une galerie à l’italienne. Chacun compte d’un à trois articles Wikipédia, sous le seuil que l’atlas fixe pour son pays : chacun est donc ajouté à la main, comme le sont les demandes des lecteurs depuis juillet.
• Le monastère Solovetski figure sur la carte comme forteresse. Il a repoussé l’ordre de Livonie et les Suédois en 1571, 1582 et 1611, et ses murailles de blocs erratiques géants ont été élevées en 1584–94 sur une île de la mer Blanche ; Wikidata le range pourtant parmi les monastères, un type qu’aucune requête de l’atlas n’atteint. u/Aprilprinces l’avait signalé comme manquant sous une carte r/MapPorn tirée de ce jeu de données.
• Fort Conger quitte la carte. Le même commentateur a fait remarquer qu’il s’agissait d’« une maison en bois, sans même une fonction militaire » : la base que l’expédition de la baie Lady Franklin a bâtie en 1881 sur l’île d’Ellesmere pour la première Année polaire internationale. Wikidata le qualifie de fort parce que ses bâtisseurs l’ont nommé ainsi ; l’atlas classe un lieu selon ce qu’il est.

7 septembre 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 septembre 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 septembre 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 septembre 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 septembre 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) — and 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.

1er septembre 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 août 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 août 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 août 2026 — Trois forts de Lyon qui n’existent plus figuraient comme forteresses. Ce sont des ruines désormais, et 156 autres avec eux

• Un monument qui n’est plus là est classé comme ruine. En vérifiant les entrées lyonnaises d’il y a deux jours, trois de ses forts se sont révélés démolis : le fort de Caluire en 1933 pour le stade Henri-Cochet, le fort de la Duchère dans les années 1960 pour un complexe sportif, et le fort de Montessuy, dont il reste quelques escarpes et une « dame » de pierre. Tous trois étaient apparus comme des forteresses debout. Ce sont des ruines désormais — c’est ainsi que l’atlas nomme tout site démoli et jamais reconstruit.
• Cent cinquante-six autres, trouvés en posant la même question à chaque monument. Six des entrées françaises arrivées le 26 août sont dites en ruine dans leurs propres articles — Couzan, Fallavier, Albon, Cordon, Mornas, Chamelet — et figuraient comme châteaux parce que la passe des ruines n’avait pas été relancée après l’ajout. Une lecture des états de conservation de Wikidata sur les 6 269 non-ruines a donné 186 candidats ; 17 dont l’introduction de l’article dit que l’édifice a disparu ou est une ruine ont été reclassés, parmi eux Baynard’s Castle à Londres, l’hôtel Saint-Pol à Paris, le château de Tervuren et Fort Macquarie, où se dresse l’Opéra de Sydney. Les 161 que l’introduction ne pouvait trancher ont ensuite été lus un par un contre leurs propres infobox, catégories et articles en langue d’origine sur Wikipédia. 133 de plus sont des ruines désormais — Bodiam, Chepstow, Threave, Carreg Cennen, le château de Gisors et le château d’Edo parmi eux, et avec eux des sites où plus rien ne subsiste, comme Fort Amsterdam sous la douane de New York ou le Temple à Paris. 25 sont debout et restent ce qu’ils sont : Wikidata a noté leur destruction et oublié la reconstruction, comme au château de Berlin, au château de Potsdam et à la Résidence de Munich, ou la réparation, comme au château de Gaziantep après le séisme de 2023 ; chacun est verrouillé pour qu’aucune règle ne le classe jamais en ruine. Deux n’ont jamais été des monuments et quittent la carte : le canon V3, une arme dont le repère se trouvait sur la forteresse de Mimoyecques, qui prend sa place, et Carteia, une ville phénicienne et romaine.
• Cinq photographies montraient autre chose. Eilean Donan était illustré par Kilchurn Castle — Wikidata lui attribue trois images et l’atlas avait pris la mauvaise. Le château de Brissac montrait une mosaïque de festival de 2025, Carbisdale Castle son couloir d’entrée, Glenveagh Castle la vallée plutôt que le château, et Perdana Putra deux chefs de gouvernement admirant la vue depuis l’édifice. Chacun a maintenant sa propre image, et lorsque Wikidata en propose plusieurs, l’atlas préfère celle dont le nom de fichier nomme le monument.

26 août 2026 — Lyon comptait sept châteaux sur la carte, la Loire quarante-quatre. Deux lecteurs l’ont dit, et 51 monuments ont suivi

• « Pourquoi tant de châteaux français n’apparaissent pas ? Par exemple, près de Lyon il y en a beaucoup, mais rien sur la carte ! » @DeRicaudy l’a écrit sur X, en ajoutant que son coin à lui, le Beaujolais, en compte des dizaines. Un mois plus tôt, @giribot avait dit la même chose sur Bluesky et en avait nommé deux : Mornas et le fort de Bouc. Pour trancher, on a mesuré la densité plutôt que discuter : dans un rayon de 70 km, l’atlas comptait 62 monuments autour de Paris, 44 autour de Tours, 43 autour de Colmar — et sept autour de Lyon. Le Beaujolais, aucun.
• Cinquante et un monuments sont arrivés, et la région ressemble enfin au reste de la France. Dans un rayon de 70 km autour de Lyon : 7 → 52. Dans le Beaujolais : 0 → 17, dont Jarnioux — le château de la photo qu’il avait postée — avec Montmelas, La Chaize, Pizay, Bagnols, Vaurenard, Arginy et le reste de la liste de l’office de tourisme. La ceinture de forts lyonnais du XIXe siècle a suivi : Vancia, Bron, Bruissin, Loyasse, Caluire, Montessuy, la Duchère. Et les deux cités sur Bluesky : la forteresse de Mornas et le fort de Bouc.
• Pourquoi la carte ne pouvait pas le corriger seule. La France est l’un des ensembles les plus fournis de l’atlas : son classement de notoriété coupait donc haut, et chacune des 469 entrées précédentes s’appuyait sur au moins cinq éditions de Wikipédia. Les châteaux autour de Lyon ne sont souvent documentés qu’en français et se situent à trois ou quatre — aucun classement ne les aurait jamais atteints. Ils ont été ajoutés à la main, chacun vérifié sur son type Wikidata et non sur son nom : c’est pourquoi l’amphithéâtre et l’odéon romains de Lyon, l’aqueduc du Gier et une école d’agriculture installée dans un château, remontés par la même recherche, n’y figurent pas.
• L’Australie a aussi été vérifiée, et la réponse honnête est différente. Après que Time Out Australia eut envoyé ses lecteurs vers la page du pays, dix monuments paraissaient peu. En réalité, l’ensemble des fortifications australiennes présentes sur Wikidata avec photo, coordonnées exactes et articles en deux langues se limite à quinze, dont l’atlas avait déjà huit. Les quatre qui remplissaient les critères ont été ajoutées — Bradleys Head, Princess Royal Fortress, Fort Banks et Fort Cowan Cowan — et l’Australie en compte désormais quatorze. Le chiffre est petit parce que l’Australie a peu de châteaux, pas parce que l’atlas les ignorait.
• Chaque photographie de l’atlas nomme désormais son auteur. 744 images n’affichaient que « Photo · Wikimedia Commons » ; chacune porte maintenant le nom et la licence, ce que la plupart de ces licences demandent en retour.
• Trois forteresses posées sur autre chose. La forteresse de Kaunas avait reçu les coordonnées du château de Kaunas, alors que le château date du XIVe siècle et que la forteresse est une ceinture de 1882 autour de toute la ville ; la position fortifiée de Namur était posée sur le fort de Malonne, l’un de ses neuf forts ; et la forteresse de Mayence sur sa propre citadelle. Chacune est désormais placée au centre de ses propres forts documentés, là où la ceinture se trouve réellement.

26 août 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 août 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 août 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 août 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 août 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 août 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 août 2026 — La traduction n’allait que dans un sens — désormais chaque monument raconte son histoire en anglais

• 1 292 monuments dont le seul article de Wikipédia est en hongrois, en russe, en chinois ou dans l’une de dix-neuf autres langues racontent maintenant leur histoire en anglais. Le château de Bobrouïsk ouvrait sa page anglaise sur un paragraphe en russe. La cause était structurelle : la traduction n’allait que vers l’extérieur, du chapeau anglais vers les six autres éditions ; un monument sans article anglais n’avait donc rien d’où être traduit. Elle va désormais dans les deux sens. Chacune de ces histoires nomme la Wikipédia dont elle provient et dit franchement qu’une machine l’a traduite — c’est la condition posée par la licence.
• Et 156 monuments qui n’avaient aucune histoire en ont une — parmi eux le mur d’Hadrien, neuvième de tout l’atlas, la porte d’Ishtar, le mur d’Antonin, les murailles de Constantinople, Mistra, Monteriggioni et la Porta Nigra. Ils sont arrivés avec l’extension d’août aux murailles et aux portes, et le script qui va chercher les chapeaux anglais n’avait pas tourné en entier depuis. La couverture anglaise passe de 79 % à 99,6 %.
• Les six autres éditions ont reçu le même filet. 847 pages de /de/, /es/, /fr/, /ja/, /nl/ et /pl/ n’affichaient aucune histoire alors que la Wikipédia d’origine du monument en avait une bonne : l’atlas cherchait dans la langue du lecteur, puis en anglais, et s’arrêtait là. Il se rabat désormais sur la Wikipédia d’origine, dans sa langue, signalée et créditée.
• 1 857 fiches de la carte se sont mises à décrire le château plutôt qu’elles-mêmes. Survoler Osaka affichait « château japonais » ; l’Aljafería, « bien culturel » ; Kenilworth, « ruine de château » — une étiquette Wikidata répétant la pastille d’à côté. Pire : 380 fiches ne disaient rien du tout, dont Gjirokastër, sur des pages au texte long de plusieurs paragraphes. Une fiche prend désormais la première phrase de l’article — y compris celles traduites en anglais aujourd’hui — si bien que 5 642 portent une vraie description et qu’il n’en reste que 61 sans rien à dire.
• Choses plus petites. Les quatre commandes de la carte tiennent de nouveau sur une seule ligne — les flèches ont disparu et la taille du texte dépend désormais de la langue, « Tout parcourir / Surprenez-moi » réclamant une fois et demie la place de « Browse / Surprise me » — au lieu de laisser À propos seul sur une deuxième rangée, et le panneau garde sa largeur, donc la carte garde sa place. Sur téléphone, ces quatre-là se trouvent désormais au-dessus du panneau et restent visibles : jusqu’ici, atteindre la liste des châteaux ou le jeu passait par un bouton intitulé « Filtres ». CastleGuessr supprime sur téléphone la barre d’instruction sous la photo. Les liens vers les atlas frères disent maintenant World Train Map. Et un château a quitté la carte : قصر مارد s’est révélé être un second élément Wikidata pour Marid Castle, à 117 mètres — l’atlas en compte 7 044. Le panneau cite enfin Detourmap — tous les autres pieds de page du site le font depuis juillet. Et vingt récits qui commençaient par des déchets d’extraction plutôt que par une phrase — un }} égaré, une ligne de coordonnées nue, le i3i6 de la Wikipédia allemande — commencent désormais par leurs premiers mots ; seize d’entre eux étaient des pages allemandes.

11 août 2026 — Chaque histoire courte devient l'histoire entière — dans les sept langues à la fois

• 2 338 monuments dont la page ne racontait qu'une ligne racontent désormais leur article entier. Là où l'introduction de la Wikipédia anglaise restait sous les 400 caractères, l'atlas lit maintenant l'article complet — les sections d'histoire, pas seulement la définition — et l'espace du récit double sur la page.
• Le nouveau texte a été lu pour ses dates comme cet atlas lit toujours : 327 monuments de plus énoncent une fondation documentée — 75 % de l'atlas est daté. Les années de vie d'un architecte entre parenthèses ne sont pas une fondation, un clocher de 1905 ne date pas un château du XIVe siècle, et « construit avant 1400 » porte désormais honnêtement son « v. ».
• Les six autres langues ont rattrapé l'anglais en une nuit : plus de 22 600 histoires ont été retraduites, remplaçant les traductions d'une phrase là où la Wikipédia française n'a pas d'article. Et là où elle a un article qui dit moins que l'anglais, la page garde l'introduction française en tête et poursuit en dessous avec l'histoire anglaise, clairement signalée comme traduction automatique.
• Deux changements pour les moteurs de recherche : l'extrait de recherche de chaque page se termine désormais par ce que seul cet atlas sait — le rang dans le pays, le siècle et la place sur une carte interactive — au lieu de dupliquer la première phrase de Wikipédia ; et chaque photographie déclare son auteur, sa licence et sa page source sur Wikimedia Commons.

10 août 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 août 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 août 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 août 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 août 2026 — L’atlas ne renonce plus dans un onglet en arrière-plan, et le japonais ne tombe plus sur l’anglais

• Ouvrez l’une de ces cartes dans un onglet en arrière-plan, patientez quelques secondes puis affichez-le : l’atlas s’était rabattu en silence sur son fond de carte le plus sommaire — des contours de pays, sans littoraux, sans relief ni noms de lieux — et y restait pour toute la visite. Un navigateur ne dessine pas un onglet que personne ne regarde, et la bibliothèque cartographique assemble chaque style précisément dans cette étape de dessin : rien ne pouvait donc se charger dans l’onglet en attente. La carte lisait ce silence comme une panne du serveur de tuiles, basculait sur le fond hors ligne et dépensait ses deux tentatives de reprise pendant que personne ne regardait. Ce compte à rebours ne démarre plus qu’une fois la page réellement à l’écran — et un serveur de tuiles véritablement injoignable cède la place au fond de secours aussi vite qu’auparavant.
• CastleGuessr pouvait perdre le monde sur lequel il se joue. Le plateau s’ouvre sur une terre nue quadrillée et glisse la vraie carte en dessous dès que le serveur de tuiles répond — mais si cette réponse arrivait avant que le plateau soit prêt, l’échange était abandonné pour de bon et toute la session se jouait sur une scène vide. C’est exactement ce que fait un onglet en arrière-plan, et une réponse servie depuis le cache lors d’une nouvelle visite peut en faire autant. Ce sont désormais les tuiles qui attendent le plateau, et non l’inverse. Ce même échange pouvait aussi effacer de la carte votre point, le château et la ligne qui les relie s’il survenait après votre appui, alors que la carte de résultat annonçait encore votre écart ; le plateau redessine maintenant la manche qu’il tient.
• La page du jeu est désormais le jeu : le texte qui se trouvait un écran sous le plateau a disparu.
• Et une manche dont la photographie refuse de se charger propose le château suivant au lieu de vous laisser deviner à l’aveugle.
• Les lecteurs japonais tombaient encore sur de l’anglais sur 141 pages de monuments — toutes les forteresses ajoutées à l’atlas cette semaine, de l’abbaye du Mont-Saint-Michel à la citadelle du Caire et aux murailles de Jérusalem. Les 141 s’ouvrent désormais en japonais. Parmi les pages qui portent une description, 92,6 pour cent se lisent en japonais ; il reste les monuments documentés uniquement dans une troisième langue, affichés dans cette langue et crédités à elle.

6 août 2026 — CastleGuessr retrouve sa carte, et sur téléphone la photo s’efface

• Le jeu n’avait plus de plateau. Hier, l’atlas a reçu un vrai relief, et le jeu construit son plateau à partir du style de l’atlas, débarrassé de toute étiquette : il a donc hérité de la nouvelle couche d’ombrage en laissant derrière lui la source d’altitude. MapLibre jette un style entier dès qu’une seule couche pointe vers une source absente, et celui qui fonctionnait est alors déjà démonté. Restait un jeu dont le seul moyen de répondre, la carte du monde, manquait purement et simplement, sur ordinateur comme sur téléphone. Le plateau porte désormais l’altitude, ignore toute couche sans source et garde son quadrillage au lieu de le perdre dès l’arrivée du fond de carte. Chaque style de carte du site passe, à chaque compilation, par le validateur de MapLibre lui-même.
• Sur téléphone, la photo était à la fois la question et la cachette de la réponse : elle remplissait le panneau, et la carte qu’il faut toucher se trouvait dessous. C’est maintenant une vignette dans le coin supérieur — moins d’un dixième de l’écran — qu’un appui agrandit si vous voulez regarder de plus près. La consigne est passée sur sa propre ligne en dessous, le score de la manche en cours apparaît dans la barre, ce que le téléphone n’avait jamais eu, et une fois la manche jouée, la photo s’étire en bandeau au-dessus de la carte de résultat.
• Les lecteurs polonais se voyaient proposer des châteaux « w Macedonia Północna ». La Macédoine du Nord manquait au tableau des formes du locatif, si bien que le nom restait indécliné dans chaque titre, description et question de cette page ; on lit désormais w Macedonii Północnej. Le français a gagné les formes avec article du même pays.
• Deux châteaux différents portaient le même nom, Janowiec Castle — l’un est la ruine dominant la Vistule en voïvodie de Lublin, l’autre un château frontière à 450 km à l’ouest — et tous deux se dressent dans un village appelé Janowiec. Le second s’affiche dorénavant Janowiec Castle (Lubusz).

5 août 2026 — Le classement apprend à lire toutes les langues, la Pologne échange quatre-vingt-dix entrées contre sa dignité — et le relief revient

• La renommée se mesurait en anglais. Le classement mêle l’étendue de la documentation d’un monument à celle de sa lecture — et cette moitié-là ne comptait que la Wikipédia anglophone. Un château dont l’article existe en polonais, en allemand ou en espagnol et nulle part ailleurs comptait donc zéro lecteur et sombrait. Cela concernait 1 408 monuments, un sur cinq de l’atlas. Le lectorat est désormais additionné sur toutes les éditions linguistiques : Neuschwanstein est lu 850 000 fois par an en anglais et 290 000 fois de plus en allemand, et le palais de Moszna a huit fois plus de lecteurs que son article anglais ne le laissait croire. Plus aucun monument n’est hors classement. L’ancienne réserve affichée sur la page du classement — que les chiffres penchaient vers l’anglais — a disparu : elle n’est plus vraie.
• La Pologne a perdu quatre-vingt-dix entrées et s’en porte mieux. Pour répondre à un lecteur polonais qui trouvait la carte vide là où il habite, l’objectif du pays avait été porté au niveau allemand le matin même — mais le vivier polonais de châteaux bien documentés s’épuise vers 360. Les quatre-vingt-dix dernières admissions étaient donc le fond du panier : des lieux portés par deux Wikipédias, certains même pas nommés mais seulement décrits (« Castle in Dzięgielów », « Manor house II, so-called castle in Stary Sielec »). Ils sont retirés, l’objectif est placé là où s’arrêtent les sources, et un seuil ne peut plus acheter une qualité qui n’existe pas. La Pologne compte à présent 361 monuments, aucun sous trois langues.
• Sept palais polonais étaient classés châteaux, parce que le classificateur lisait l’anglais et l’allemand et jamais le polonais — un monument dont l’unique article s’ouvre sur « Pałac w… » n’était jamais interrogé sur sa nature. Il lit le polonais désormais, et dix-huit monuments ont changé pour la bonne catégorie.
• Et une batterie d’artillerie a quitté la carte des châteaux. La batterie Dietl est une position d’artillerie côtière allemande de 1942, et elle figurait comme château ; neuf autres positions du XX^e siècle l’ont suivie, portées pour la plupart par deux Wikipédias. Les forts côtiers du XIX^e restent — Tung Chung de 1817, Murray de 1841, Konstantin de 1840 — car un fort qui se visite est un monument, une position de guerre une installation.
• La carte montre enfin le terrain. De vraies altitudes ombrent chaque versant, chaque crête et chaque vallée, à partir de données publiques ouvertes : on voit enfin pourquoi un château se dresse là. La vue d’ouverture n’y perd rien : le relief arrive quand vous descendez vers un pays, c’est-à-dire au moment où un versant veut dire quelque chose.

5 août 2026 — L’édition néerlandaise apprend le néerlandais, la Pologne cesse de paraître vide et les citadelles rentrent au bercail

• L’atlas néerlandais se lit enfin en néerlandais. 3 961 récits qui restaient en anglais sur /nl/ ont été traduits : le néerlandais était la dernière édition où un lecteur pouvait rencontrer un château dans une langue qu’il n’avait pas demandée. Avec elle disparaît le dernier avis de traduction automatique : aucune édition n’en porte plus, parce qu’aucune n’en a besoin — chaque récit traduit le dit lui-même dans sa ligne de crédit, et c’est là que cela se dit.
• La Pologne était maigre, et un lecteur l’a dit tout net. Sur le site de liens polonais wykop, jaroslaw-lazarczyk a jugé la carte inutile chez lui : la voïvodie de Lubusz affichait deux châteaux alors que plusieurs se dressent à moins de vingt kilomètres, et arturo1983 et bialy100k en ont dit autant de leurs régions. Ils avaient raison. La Pologne est passée de 279 monuments à 451, Lubusz de quatorze à vingt-deux, et le même passage a réparé cinq fiches polonaises dont l’étiquette Wikidata avait livré une adresse, un génitif et deux bâtiments nommés d’après ce qui s’est élevé plus tard sur place.
• Et toute une famille de forteresses manquait. Le château de Berat — la citadelle albanaise classée par l’UNESCO, dont les murs abritent toujours un village — était absent parce que Wikidata le range comme quartier de Berat : aucune requête de l’atlas ne pouvait l’atteindre. Vérifier si d’autres se cachaient de la même façon en a révélé cinquante-six, dont la citadelle du Caire, lue en trente-cinq langues. Vingt-neuf sont désormais sur la carte — la citadelle de Saladin au-dessus du Caire, le Mont-Saint-Michel, Fort Alamo, les murailles de Jérusalem, Anadoluhisarı sur le Bosphore, le Kale de Skopje, les remparts de Kotor, la citadelle d’Amman, la kasbah des Oudayas, Rhodes, Kangra, les levées en spirale de Cổ Loa et la barbacane de Varsovie — et la requête qui les manquait est corrigée à la racine, si bien que les autres viendront d’elles-mêmes. L’atlas recense à présent 7 003 monuments dans 141 pays, Bahreïn pour la première fois.
• CastleGuessr ne garde que la photographie. Le nom du château a quitté le plateau, et avec lui les points pâles qui éparpillaient tous les autres châteaux sur la carte : à eux deux ils répondaient à la moitié de la question, puisque le nom se cherchait et que les points montraient quelles contrées étaient seulement possibles. Une photographie, la Terre entière, un appui. Le nom arrive avec la révélation, à sa place.

5 août 2026 — CastleGuessr dans sa forme définitive, chaque photo nomme son photographe — et 364 pages muettes trouvent leur voix

• CastleGuessr est désormais le seul jeu que son nom promettait — la forme éprouvée sur notre atlas frère Movie Scene Map. L’énigme quotidienne et les manches sans fin au clavier sont parties, autocomplétion comprise. Chaque manche pose la même question nette : voici le château, nom et photo — où se dresse-t-il ? Un appui sur la carte du monde répond, noté jusqu’à 5 000 selon la proximité, et la révélation trace la ligne de votre appui à la vérité. Le plateau a aussi cessé d’étiqueter les villes — une carte qui écrit « Osaka » répondrait à votre place. Jouez tant qu’il vous plaît ; manches, moyenne et record restent sur votre appareil.
• Chaque photographie nomme désormais son photographe. 6 469 des 6 653 photos de l’atlas affichent leur auteur d’après Wikimedia Commons — sur la fiche de la carte interactive, sur la page de chaque château et dans le jeu — à côté de la licence qu’il a choisie. Le reste n’enregistre aucun auteur lisible par machine et reste crédité à Commons.
• 364 monuments qui n’avaient d’histoire dans aucune des sept langues de l’atlas la racontent désormais dans la leur. Leur seul article de Wikipédia vit en hongrois, russe, chinois, roumain, portugais, tchèque, arabe, grec… — c’est donc cette histoire qui ouvre maintenant leurs pages, marquée de sa langue et créditée à son édition, au lieu d’une phrase de données.
• Et le découpeur qui décapitait des phrases aux abréviations — un extrait finissant par « located in Strelna in St. » se disait complet — est réparé partout où il vivait, y compris le cas du trait d’union fraîchement attrapé (« Feldbrunnen-St. Niklaus »). 51 pages dont les sources cassées refusaient la traduction se lisent désormais entières en japonais, polonais, espagnol, français et allemand.

4 août 2026 — Un lecteur a surpris le classement en défaut — et une caravane de corrections a suivi

• Sur Menéame, yarkyark a dit tout haut ce que le classement taisait : des châteaux inconnus trônaient en tête, « et l’Alhambra n’apparaît pas ». Il avait raison, et c’était pire : une mise à jour deux jours plus tôt avait perdu en silence les chiffres de lectorat de 5 807 monuments — la renommée ne se jugeait plus qu’à la couverture Wikipédia, et la page de l’Espagne plaçait Numance première, l’Alhambra 107e. La fuite est colmatée à la source, le lectorat de chaque monument a été rechargé, l’Alhambra est à sa place.
• 241 monuments rejoignent l’atlas — 6 653 dans 140 pays. Par courriel, Eloy a montré que la mémoire de la Catalogne s’écrit en catalan — son exemple, le Castell de Burriac, n’avait aucun article en anglais —, alors l’atlas lit désormais les Wikipédias catalane, basque et galicienne pour l’Espagne, montée à 500 entrées. Les Émirats passent de un à dix-huit forts, Oman passe de sept à treize ; la Guinée-Bissau et Wallis-et-Futuna entrent pour la première fois.
• Chaque page localisée porte désormais son nom dans les deux langues : 大阪城 répond aussi à Osaka Castle dans l’onglet et sous le titre. Et les débuts de phrase arrivés cassés (« S. Virgin Islands. » en guise de phrase) sont réparés au séparateur qui les brisait : près d’un millier de pages en cinq langues ont troqué l’anglais de secours ou des fragments contre des phrases entières dans leur langue.
• Le jeu s’appelle désormais CastleGuessr et sait faire ce que son nom promet : le mode pin. Vous connaissez le château — photo et nom affichés —, mais où se dresse-t-il ? Un seul appui sur la carte du monde, noté comme les classiques : 5 000 points à moins de 25 km, fondant à chaque kilomètre d’écart. Le quotidien et le sans-fin continuent tels quels.

4 août 2026 — L’édition française se lit désormais en français

• Depuis juillet, l’édition française portait un compromis assumé : là où aucun article n’existait dans la Wikipédia en français, la page racontait son histoire en anglais — et le disait. Ce compromis prend fin aujourd’hui. 1 878 descriptions de monuments ont été traduites depuis le résumé introductif de la Wikipédia en anglais que chacune de ces pages a toujours cité. Le même jour, il en va de même pour les éditions allemande (1 643), espagnole (2 587) et polonaise (3 736), et hier pour la japonaise : cinq des sept éditions de cet atlas racontent maintenant chaque histoire qu’elles peuvent dans la langue de leur lecteur. La description sous un résultat de recherche également.
• La traduction respecte les usages français — siècles en chiffres romains (XIIIe siècle), espaces insécables avant les deux-points, guillemets français — et conserve intacts tous les chiffres, dates et gloses en écriture d’origine. Chaque page traduite nomme l’article de la Wikipédia en anglais dont elle provient et indique clairement qu’une machine l’a traduite.
• Environ 380 pages sur les cinq éditions restent en anglais à dessein : leurs extraits sources arrivent abîmés — coupés en milieu de phrase, voire de mot — et une phrase brisée traduite reste une phrase brisée. Elles attendent une meilleure source, pas une supposition plus hardie. L’avertissement qui signalait les descriptions en anglais a lui aussi disparu : une mise en garde devenue fausse vaut moins que pas de mise en garde du tout.

3 août 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 août 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 août 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 août 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 juillet 2026 — L’atlas parle désormais français

• Chaque page de cet atlas existe désormais en français sous /fr/ — les 5 793 pages de monuments, les 138 pages de pays, tous les classements, les guides d’excursion des 240 villes, les statistiques, les données ouvertes et le jeu quotidien. C’est la septième langue de l’atlas.
• La Wikipédia en français couvre ce sujet comme presque aucune autre édition : 3 394 monuments — 58,6 % de l’atlas, juste derrière l’allemand — s’ouvrent sur leur introduction de frwiki, et le château de Versailles se lit tel que fr.wikipedia l’a écrit. Les exonymes français couvrent 99 % des villes (Londres, Cracovie, Ratisbonne). Le reste garde l’histoire en anglais, marquée lang="en" et créditée honnêtement.
• La grammaire française est stockée, pas devinée : chaque pays porte sa locution complète (en France, au Portugal, aux Pays-Bas, à Malte), les articles des monuments se lisent dans les introductions de frwiki avec leur casse (le château de Versailles, l’Alhambra), et « de » se contracte tout seul (près du Caire). Les siècles sont en chiffres romains (XIIIe siècle). L’interface est une traduction automatique en attente d’une relecture native — le pied de page le dit.

31 juillet 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 juillet 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 juillet 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 juillet 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 juillet 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 juillet 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 juillet 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 juillet 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 juillet 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 juillet 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 juillet 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 juillet 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 juillet 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 juillet 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 juillet 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 juillet 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 juillet 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 juillet 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 juillet 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 juillet 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 juillet 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 juillet 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 juillet 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 juillet 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 juillet 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 juillet 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 juillet 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 juillet 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 juillet 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 juillet 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 juillet 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 juillet 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 juillet 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 juillet 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 juillet 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 juillet 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 juillet 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 juillet 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 juillet 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 juillet 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.