Explore 2,435 Castles, Fortresses, and Palaces on This Free Interactive Map
The World's 2,400 Castles
I built Castlemap, a free interactive atlas featuring 2,435 of the world's most significant castles, fortresses, and palaces across 129 countries. Curated entirely from open data like Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons, every landmark includes a photo, founding date, and story. Whether you are exploring the Palace of Versailles or the Forbidden City, you can browse by country or fame without needing an account.
Rather than plotting every fortification on Earth, the atlas curates the 2,435 most significant castles, fortresses and palaces — each verified to have a real photo, an English Wikipedia article and exact coordinates — balanced across 129 countries so the map stays explorable.
- Flightmussy
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....
- Bedon292
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.
- pmontra
Interesting but very difficult to perform in the right way. Example: Italy has maybe 45k buildings that could show on that map https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categoria:Castelli_d%27Italia
but they can't be collected by looking at the English Wikipedia so it's almost empty compared to what could be. Other countries, same problem.
Somebody suggested in other comments that the data could be from OpenStreetMap. Or let people add their own castles, but then you have all the sort of problems of content moderation.
- riffraff
mh, a pretty nice castle near my hometown is listed as a Castle in wikidata, but missing on the mao, you may want to check what's up with the mapping
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q63495355
EDIT: ah, it's only those with an english wikipedia page, nevermind
- Sharlin
I love that the annual snow castle in Kemi, Finland, is included =D https://thecastlemap.com/castles/snowcastle-of-kemi/
- clickety_clack
This is off by many degrees of magnitude for Ireland at least: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1nkvqd7/oc...
- prmph
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.
- mrjay42
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!)