Wijzigingslogboek

Wat is nieuw op Castlemap

Een kleine atlas, eerlijk bijgehouden: elke zichtbare wijziging komt hier terecht, nieuwste eerst. Hij wordt door één persoon in de openbaarheid gemaakt — AI doet veel van het zware werk, een mens beslist wat er live gaat. Correcties zijn welkom.

Volgen via de feed: /changelog/feed.xml (Atom)

28 juli 2026 — De atlas spreekt nu Nederlands

Elke pagina van deze atlas bestaat nu in het Nederlands op /nl/ — alle 5.793 bouwwerkpagina’s, 138 landenpagina’s, 240 dagtripgidsen per stad, alle ranglijsten, de statistiek, de datapagina en het dagelijkse spel. Het is de vijfde taal naast Engels, Duits, Japans en Pools, en het is een volledige spiegel: niets valt stilletjes terug op een Engelse pagina.
Echt Nederlands is het bouwwerk zelf overal waar de Nederlandse Wikipedia een artikel heeft — 1.616 stuks, 28% van de atlas, en vrijwel elk daarvan een dat een Nederlandse lezer ook echt opzoekt. Het Muiderslot opent met de inleiding uit nlwiki en heet Muiderslot, niet Muiden Castle. De overige 72% houdt de Engelse naam en het Engelse verhaal, gemarkeerd met lang="en" zodat een schermlezer Engelse zinnen niet met Nederlandse uitspraakregels voorleest, en met de Engelstalige Wikipedia bij naam als bron. Die terugval wordt nooit de paginabeschrijving: zonder Nederlands artikel wordt die uit de gegevens opgebouwd, in het Nederlands.
Twee stukjes Nederlandse grammatica zijn niet uit een landnaam af te leiden en worden daarom opgeslagen in plaats van geraden: eilanden krijgen op en niet in (op Malta, op Cyprus), en een handvol landen draagt een lidwoord (in de Verenigde Staten, in de Filipijnen). Steden gebruiken hun Nederlandse exoniemen: de dagtripgidsen gaan over Keulen, Wenen, Praag en Warschau.
De chrome — de menubalk, de knoppen, de opgebouwde zinnen — is een eerste versie en verdient nog het oog van een moedertaalspreker. Correcties zijn welkom.

27 juli 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 juli 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 juli 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 juli 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 juli 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 juli 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 juli 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 juli 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 juli 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 juli 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 juli 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 juli 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 juli 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 juli 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 juli 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 juli 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 juli 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 juli 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 juli 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 juli 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 juli 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 juli 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 juli 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 juli 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 juli 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 juli 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 juli 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 juli 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 juli 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 juli 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 juli 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 juli 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 juli 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 juli 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 juli 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.