Changelog

What’s new on Castlemap

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

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24 July 2026 — A Japanese edition, and cleaner type

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

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

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

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

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

22 July 2026 — Browse with pictures — and 210 truer ruins

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

22 July 2026 — Founding years for hundreds more castles

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

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

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

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

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

21 July 2026 — Medieval castles, on their own map

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

20 July 2026 — Every category gets its oldest

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

19 July 2026 — Reader requests: Norway and India grow

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

18 July 2026 — Guess the Castle — a daily game

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

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

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

15 July 2026 — Honest sitemap dates

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

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

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

13 July 2026 — The most famous castle in every country

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

12 July 2026 — Statistics, embeds and an MCP server

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

11 July 2026 — Stories, fame and free data

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

10 July 2026 — 2,400 landmarks across 131 countries

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

9 July 2026 — Launch

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