Nice project :3
There's a MASSIVE amount of castles missing
Just for France, the castle visible on the map -> this is not even 5%
Depending on the count it goes from 20000 castles to 45000 (just for France!)
The ones in the area where I used to live are all missing.
Hungary has more than a lot missing https://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magyarorsz%C3%A1gi_v%C3%A1rak_...
Needs some of the ones referenced here (including the Dupont Castle, the work of the site's author, who lasted provided a work update in '22): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27929729
I had to look up Madagascar's castle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rova_of_Antananarivo
The Rova of Antananarivo /ˈruːvə/ (Malagasy: Rovan'i Manjakamiadana [ˈruvᵊn manˌdzakəmiˈadə̥nᵊ]) is a royal palace complex (rova) in Madagascar that was the home of the sovereigns of the Kingdom of Imerina in the 17th and 18th centuries, as well as of the rulers of the Kingdom of Madagascar in the 19th century. Located in the central highland city of Antananarivo, the Rova occupies the highest point on Analamanga, formerly the highest of Antananarivo's many hills.
Really luke it, but on mobile (firefox) the links (to wikipedia etc) just don't work..
Ignorant list. If you are including smaller form factor forts/castles from Europe only then you have to include them from India as well. Example “Thikana” etc etc.
Great project! Kudos to the designer.
Might need additional datasets though -- this one is lacking. only ~10 fortresses in France? LOL
The fortress / castle distinction is quite difficult and perhaps not useful? This map classifies the Crac (Krak) des Chevaliers[0], in modern-day Syria, as a "castle" but I would argue it's really a "fortress" (and in fact, one of the best preserved ancient fortresses in the world).
Clearly vibe-coded. Cool idea though. I can see what was leveraged from the Wikipedia data set.
Side question: why does Claude prefer dark backgrounds with low-contrast text?
Seems like it's missing a lot for Switzerland.
This is missing castles. There are several in and near lerici Italy not listed
Interesting, still I miss most castles around me.
Is a palace a castle? If so then there are a huge number missing in India.
The 10 most famous castles in the world
Palace of Versailles France
Forbidden City People's Republic of China
Neuschwanstein Castle Germany
Buckingham Palace England
Alhambra Spain
Tower of London England
Windsor Castle England
Kremlin Russia
Red Fort India
Topkapı Palace Turkey
So I could name recognise the top ten, and yeah I won’t argue too hard with the list, just apart from Neuschwanstein - but the second I saw it I realised I did not know the name but “Bavarian fairy castle” clearly deserves its ranking
Slop
Heavily lacking at least in Poland. Reeks clanker powered. I miss the times where actual hobbyists were doing stuff.
Palácio da Bolsa in Porto is not, at all, a castle. It was built in the XIX century as the stock market and never served defensive purposes as castles would. Not to speak about the sheer amount of misses in Portugal. This is off by a lot!
Nice project, but what is "hidden" gem about Elmina castle in Ghana?
If Cape Coast Castle is described as "world renowned", then Elmina should be as well. I live in Ghana their popularity is almost evenly matched.
Also Elmina castle is the oldest and largest European building in existence in sub-Saharan Africa.
One more thing, it is kind of hard to click on specific dots when they are so clustered together. I had to zoom in a lot to see and be able to click on some of the castles I knew were there.
Where is the castle of James Damore?
Excellent usecase of map and history. Request to add a year range selector or slider
I mean, the reason why these dominate in Europe is because largely of the medieval era and a bit before that. Once gunpowder became more widely used, castles became increasingly obsolete. Nowadays they have only touristic value really or movie values, such as the castle in the movie Monty Python and the holy grail. Other than that they are just stone ruins really, some more polished than others. They have no real worth nowadays other than wonder how many resources went into building them.
Also, as others pointed out, the map is missing many castles. I also doubt the spread over China, the map only says about 7 castles in whole China? So that seems totally wrong. The definition for a castle must be incorrect, because Japan has attributed many more and that is simply objectively incorrect. Is the chinese palace classified as a castle? If not, why not? If yes then why not other palaces in China? The map is really not very good here. It should begin by a good definition of what is meant with a castle.
The local "castle" on the map is Fort Duquesne, which is listed as "ruins" but in fact has no ruins to visit. It says "The site of both forts is now occupied by Point State Park, where the outlines of the two forts have been laid in granite slabs" - which is true, but...there are no ruins here!
If forts count as castles, at least do Fort Pitt, which has the blockhouse functional.
Anyways - this is a fun project and it should continue!
It also lists the Bastille, which was completely demolished and is now a public square.
This is not a "map of castles".
I checked my local area, and it omits interesting castles, instead including palaces, landmarks and world war era fortresses.
Shameful submission.
What's really neat about this isn't just the visualization, but that they’ve packaged the whole dataset as open GeoJSON/CSV mirrored on Hugging Face and GitHub—plus an MCP endpoint for AI agents.
Comment from dev in previous submission:
>This project is in early stages and the information is brought by wikipedia. The goal of this project is to make castle viewing a bit more fun.
Hi that is me! Now I guess I have to fix the project and make it proper.
This dataset is bad. The North Carolina state capitol is a castle?
Same reaction! I just drove by it... taking a careful note after seeing it in the article. It does appear a bit keep-like, but that's a stretch. Maybe if the surrounding roads were replaced with walls/battlements/ramparts and such?
Tangential, but many of these aren't what people traditionally would think of as castles. Is there any consensus on what the "castliest of castles" is? Presumably something in the UK or Ireland or thereabouts considering that's where the popular media conception of them comes from.
Since forts are included in the USA, there are loads of Napoleonic forts missing in the UK.
Plymouth is surrounded by them.
They have also completely omitted the entire chain of 'Palmerston's folly' Forts built around Portsmouth harbour.
Is this anything more substantial than a weekend-coded public data scrape?
It's worse than that, the underlying data is more than questionable.
Interesting that in Canada Rideau Hall counts, but Casa Loma does not.
or Chateau Frontenac in Quebec? What's the criteria for being a castle?
They use a crappy model I guess. This reeks AI.
Love it..
But the links don't work.
(firefox mobile)
Yes, same for me on Firefox mobile and Chrome mobile (both latest versions on Android)
Hearst Castle Missing. Please add it, it’s probably the most famous castle in California.
US is clearly underrepresented, if forts counts as castles, as it seams to do, why isn’t Fort Knox there? Probably the most defended fort in the country.
Wrong title. Wrong not even by two orders of magnitude.
There are only 20 castles in the world?
Meta commentary: this is clearly a vibe-coded frontend to a low quality "dataset" with substantial omissions.
The real value and work would be someone actually compiling and creating a high-quality castle dataset, in which case anyone could vibe-code a similar frontend to it.
Potentially a agent (swarm) could do this, if properly integrated into OSM, wikis, libraries, photographs etc. But it wouldn't be quick and would still benefit from a human-in-the-loop verifying each entry.
I hope that I can be the person who can fix the site properly. Yes this is vibe coded and the focus was to create a concept to see if the site had potential. Now after someone somehow made a post here which got so popular, I now will focus on fixing the site rather than testing the concept since it is proven that people do have an interest.
None in Ausralia?
Nope, unless you count things like this: https://www.kryalcastle.com.au/
Although there are plenty of old coastal fortifications, which don't appear to count even though things like Fort Siloso in Singapore (a WW2 vintage concrete bunker) apparently do.
Invading Australia is looking pretty tempting right now.
Invading Australia in 1500s is looking pretty tempting, you mean.
Would be amazing to see which one of these are on sale.
Castles come up for sale fairly regularly in the UK. They are (generally) relatively inexpensive to buy, but ruinously expensive to renovate and maintain.
I went to a castle in Dunedin, New Zealand, but NZ seems to be castle-less: Larnach Castle, https://www.larnachcastle.co.nz/.
Brazil also has a few castles, although not sure if they are classified differently -- https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lista_de_castelos_no_Brasil
See, I'd class those as something like 'follies' or Whimsy, as they don't appear to be actual fortifications, rather forms of affectation.
That said, I'm not sure what definition or list this site uses - as others have already pointed out, there are loads of castle missing I can tell, just from a few that I've visited across Italy.
New Zealand was colonised long after castles had become obsolete. There are a few remains of WWII coastal fortifications here and there, but they’re now obsolete too.
The Māori built thousands of hilltop fortifications with wooden palisades (Pā), but lacking metal tools they didn’t build with stone.
The page does give a pointer to Wikidata, I for one would love to see your example included.
There are many castles near my parents house in france. I don't see any of them? AI generated?
thinking the same here. combining the inaccurate data with the suspicious-looking sheen to the UI makes me think it was made with an LLM.
Clicking on full story doesn't do anything. It closes the popup (mobile android)
it's part of a webring of vibecoded slopsites
yes, webrings! time for a comeback. i just found an AI agent trained on AOL chat room materials out in the wild, way to go Bending Spoons
why do all the vibecoded slopsites have the same design? i feel icky when i visit one like eternal sunshine of the spotless vibe
We just stayed in Dalhousie Castle, the oldest in Scotland. Very beautiful and well maintained, with lots of spooky history.
If you want to leave a legacy, build something out of stone.
I mean no, it's not.
Castle Sween was built in the 11th century (and might still not be the oldest).
Dalhousie Castle was built in 1247 and the oldest bit of the surviving castle is from the 15th century. Most of it is from the 17th century. The roof is post-2004.
The actual lesson is, if you want to leave a legacy, hope someone rebuilds it when it falls apart after you're gone.
There's no need to correct. They had a lovely holiday at what they thought was the oldest castle in Scotland. Leave them to it instead of jumping in with 'actually, I've identified at least three castles older, and while we can't be certain which is the oldest fort in Scotland, we can be confident that it wasn't the one you thought you had a nice time at'
My first dotcom began by listing German castles for sale after the wall fell. https://web.archive.org/web/19970102101502/http://www.re.com...
And if I ever make an exit, the money will buy me a Germany castle! I want to be a good guardian of one.
Is Fort Ross really "Renowned" as listed? I've never heard of it and honestly it doesn't look very interesting. I'd rather visit Fort Knox which is a real fortification currently in use, world famous, and not listed here.
It’s a Russia hoax.
Australia doesn’t have a single castle!
Who would've built them before modern Australia started to exist tho?
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Italy, like Germany, Austria and maybe a few more European countries host more than 5,000 "castles".
I have lived in Austria before. I have been to some of them in Austria and South Tyrol. I think most of the castles should be visible on the map although not all are added yet. Will fix that.
Hi thanks for the feedback and thank you Marklit to submit it here!
Thecastlemap.com is one of the websites I operate. I also operate trainrouter.com, sunshineatlas.com. and europebeachmap.com.
Honestly, I did not want to focus too much on this website due to what I thought of a market of low demand. However, there are so many critical comments. Hence, I will fix it properly and this will be one of the websites I will fully commit to.
I appreciate everything guys even if you probably do not like the website. The reason why I made the website is because I reallly like castles....
Please don't be detered by the less constructive comments, there are a myriad of approaches one could take and it's impossible to please everyone. Even if it has failings I think it's a great site and I'm grateful. Plus let's not forget it's delightfully free of advertising/ pushy banners to sign-up or pay!
Very cool project, but obviously missing (too) many great castles. I'm not sure if that way of measuring popularity is really well done.
Missing a lot, at least three around my home town.
Immediately curious about the concentration of castles on the Ghanaian coast. Wonder what that's about.
[flagged]
During the height of the Triangle Trade, Europeans built a lot of forts to protect their interests along the Gold and Ivory Coasts; why these forts are considered castles by this site is beyond me (just for clarification: a castle is a fortified private residence).
Edit: I now realise that the site specifically says "Map of the world's great castles & fortresses", so I guess the site considers them fortresses, not castles. I retract my snark.
The title of the page is "Map of the world's great castles & fortresses". So those are latter.
There is no taxonomy of these things you could make that will not cause some eyebrow raising choices.
It counts Clarence House in London in its top 100 as a world famous ‘palace’ - it’s a Georgian townhouse.
Age of sail trading post forts seem a relatively uncontroversial inclusion in comparison.
Château de Saint-Cloud, near Paris, reported as "renowned ruin" ??? What a joke! Only the gardens remain.
Even more ridiculous : Bastille also reported as "renowned ruin". Nothing remains. All stones have disappeared centuries ago.
If you submit some map, at least don't have the title contradict the content description:
"the 2,435 most significant landmarks worldwide, ordered by a fame ranking that blends Wikipedia coverage with real readership."
or someone fix the title here please to what on the app right now:
"Map of the world's great castles & fortresses" whatever that means.
Germany's Saxony alone has 700+ fortications with about 100 being touristically interesting. In the map I count like 9.
Yeah they are pretty loose w/ Castle. It is a case of "mi casa" not always "tu casa" [1].
Yeah, actually a very cool idea. Hopefully somebody takes it and makes a greatly improved version, as execution is lacking here!
not really castles - it includes palaces for examples and chateaus.
I find the word "castle" can be a little vague, like with Neuschwanstein Castle, which is really more of a palace. I don't think it's worth battling too much about what is or isn't a castle. I don't think you could come up with one set of castles in the world that satisfies everybody.
I would take it as just rounding 2,435 -> 2,400. No big deal.
The point is not the rounding, it is that it is not counting a total number of castles, but rather some subset of 'significant' castles
It also lists some "castles" that no longer exist, e.g., Fort Detroit, which was where downtown is and very much not extant (and not to be confused with Fort Wayne to the southwest of downtown, which does exist but isn't on the map). This is just some AI slop wasting our time.
They are including wooden palisaded forts, of there are many more in the US and Canada than shown.
That's less than I expected for worldwide
Apparently Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, etc... were not really into castles, while Japan was?
I suspect the Mongols destroyed a lot of Asian castles and city fortifications. They never made it to Japan.
It's not very comprehensive at all, the regions I know well in France are missing almost all of the actual castles. The site lists 180ish castles in France, when it's estimated there are 45,000 castles + chateaus in reality. Of course this depends on your exact definition of castle.
I wonder if it's only scraping english language Wikipedia articles?
Why nothing in North America but forts? There are lots of ancient structures that should be considered. Ex: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montezuma_Castle_National_Monu...
I'm moderately disappointed that Fort Point in San Francisco isn't listed.
Things like Fort Dearborn in Chicago are listed, but all that remains is markers of the perimeter... while Fort Point is a structure that you can visit and walk around.
There's at least a couple on the map, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chapultepec_Castle
That one you linked definitely merits inclsion, tho. Had never heard of it. Thanks.
Edit: Or maybe not: apparently it's not considered a castle, despite the name.
Castle means fortified stone building then? What are you considering? Wikipedia has many more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_castles_in_the_United_...
> # Etymology
> Neither part of the monument's name is correct. ... was not a "castle" in the traditional sense, but instead may have functioned more like a "prehistoric high rise apartment complex".[8]
My understanding was always that aside from vanity castles like Craigdarroch (https://thecastle.ca) there aren't castles in North America because they're only practical in a pre-cannon world
Castles are practical against cannons but only if built with thicker walls than typical.
Castles became star forts, with stone/brick augmented with massive amount of earth. These were relatively effective against artillery into the 20th century.
Not sure if they count, but the site appears to be missing loads of British star-forts built around the great lakes, st. lawrence, and eastern Canada!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citadel_Hill_(Fort_George)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Island_(Nova_Scotia)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citadelle_of_Quebec
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Fort_Erie
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Anne
They built these things _everywhere_, probably a good part of what bankrupted the British Empire!
I imagine they only downloaded whatever was tagged as "castle" in wikidata. Compare these two:
Bran Castle: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q390275
Citadel Hill: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q321867
It’s missing the extensive Napoleonic-era Western Fortifications on the opposite side of Dover from the much more famous Dover Castle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dover_Western_Heights
But to be fair they’re much less well known, and quite well concealed, and are partly on private land, with big fences, cameras and scary warning signs. Tourists don’t seem to be much interested in post-medieval fortifications.
It's probably somewhat regional, as the ones in Canada seem to have pretty good tourism interest, especially when they're right inside a city like Quebec and Halifax.
But we're also very starved for true "Medieval Castles" like Europe or east Asia, so we take what we can get!
Cool idea, horrible dataset. Its limited to things in Wikidata rather than using OSM, and it must have an article on Wikipedia in English to count so I am sure it is missing just based on that. And somehow it misses many castles (and other categories it includes) which do meet those requirements.
There is no definition of what they use to categorize anything either. And it clearly isn't applied consistently. There is a Château category and yet many things with Château in their name are tagged as castles.
Thanks for the feedback. I will try my best to fix the dataset.
In France castles are all called Châteaux.
What a coincidence! In France, all hats are called chapeaux!
This is off by many degrees of magnitude for Ireland at least: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1nkvqd7/oc...
Same for Scotland - there are 3 castles within 2 km of where I live, not including a couple of really old ruined hill-forts... which I don't think is an unusual density of these things for this part of the world.
Edit: And of course there is also the huge castle 13km away across the sea sitting on its volcanic plug and very visible from here.
Same for France, many are missing
For England as well, assuming a conservative definition like: Norman or later, mortared stone construction with remaining walls at least 4m high, not something like a fortified farm house for a single family. If you include Iron Age hill forts, the number becomes absurd.
Same for France and Spain, which is what I am familiar with. I am expecting it to be true all around.
The map of France shows maybe 100 castles? If you include castles, forts and chateaux (which it seems the map aims to do) France has around 45000 of them, including 15k medieval castles (military), an other 15k from the Renaissance period (mix of military and luxury), and 20k more recent ones (some military, many luxury type).
I know if at least 20 medieval castles within 1h of my hometown and not a single one is here.
For Spain maybe 10k to 20k castles and forts. Out of which at least 2500 genuine medieval castles (not just big houses with fortifications)
Missing all of the "moorish" forts in Andalusia...
and for Romania, which has far, far more than are listed
and Poland....
Seems like your map lists pre-historic ring forts, not castles?
I'm not sure what the 'official' definition of a castle is, but I personally wouldn't consider a crannóg or something like Dún Aonghasa a castle. Nor would I consider a stand alone tower house a castle, although they might (along with gate lodges and great houses), sometimes be colloquially referred to as castles.
Surely a castle is a fortified building, specific to the middle ages. Wikipedia agrees - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle
Which would put the number of Anglo-Norman castles in Ireland much lower, probably something around 100.
Yeah, in the other direction, I see at least one WWII-era "pillbox" bunker in France (part of the Marginot Line?) listed as "fortress".
It's a nice idea, but the range seems extremely broad on the one hand but very incomplete on the other hand.
In the intro paragraph of the linked Wikipedia page: “Use of the term has varied over time and, sometimes, has also been applied to structures such as hill forts”.
The map has a category for fortresses too. Which are included in its total count of "castles". So it's seems reasonable to bring them up.
Fair, I think the map is nonsense, but also the idea of 30K castles in Ireland is clearly untrue.
I like the definition where castle is a fortress where a Nobel lives. Fort is where an army lives but no Nobel leader. Palace is where a Nobel lives but it isn't expected to withstand a siege
*Noble. Alfred Nobel invented stable explosives and started a Norwegian prize for achievement in science. Nobles, however, were high ranked members of the feudal hierarchy, often passing their position on to their children.
Wasn’t he Swedish?
Yes. All the prizes except the peace prize are awarded in Sweden. Norway was in a union with Sweden at the time the prizes were set up, but it's not definitely known why he chose the Norwegian parliament (via the Norwegian Nobel Committee) to aware the peace prize.