Map of the world's great castles and fortresses | Hacker News Reader

Map of the world's great castles and fortresses

thecastlemap.com

318 pointsmarklit194 comments

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!

Nice project, but unfortunately (as others have also commented) a bit incomplete. Some stuff missing in Romania (which I'm reasonably familiar with):

- Arad fortress (similar to Alba Iulia, but less well known, currently a military base): https://maps.app.goo.gl/a2Dw3W2CKCpU7cJA7

- Oradea fortress (same as above, but open to the public): https://maps.app.goo.gl/a2Dw3W2CKCpU7cJA7

- Târgu Mureș fortress (slightly smaller than the ones above, but also notable): https://maps.app.goo.gl/qcwSFL9hGqoCZXWv7

- plus lots of villages and smaller towns in Transylvania also have fortresses or fortified churches: Biertan https://maps.app.goo.gl/VVMkpaFbf7HJjbPQA, Râșnov https://maps.app.goo.gl/1LnB5h2sTj1WRmTk7, Saschiz https://maps.app.goo.gl/Yb5dDz38xXyy8JEZ7, Viscri https://maps.app.goo.gl/318uMB1fEvpqXSzi7, Rupea https://maps.app.goo.gl/6hTM8PtkQhQxXcyG8

There is a lot of stuff missing. I'm from a region in Germany where every other village has it's own castle, ruin or palace. There needs to be some selection, otherwise it's just more overwhelming. Therefore I do like the map, and it's very good imho that there is some tier-selector to pick out the good ones.

The trouble is that the definition of "castle" varies considerably between countries. For instance, the German classification divides them into "Schloss" and "Burg", but these can include anything from earthworks to barely present ruined remains of a foundation to buildings that resemble a larger than average house. French classification - under the term "chateau" and its subdivisions - is even more generous. Compare that with the Polish classification which is more strict and precise, differentiating between manors, palaces, strongholds, and permanent fortified complexes, for instance.

Sure, you could argue forever what should be included, what's significant enough (only still existing buildings or also ruins? how well-known does it have to be?), if only historical castles should be included or also things like Hearst Castle in California (which is actually a large mansion built in historical style, with the main building looking like a church - if that's included, you could also include, say, Mar-a-Lago?).

It is also important in context to include castles in Africa to show that the area did contain castles. This fact often surprises people that Africa has castles and some of them dating back to the 11 century.

For example just by looking from my eye you are missing Lamu Castle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamu_Fort Siyu Fort https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siyu Thimlich Ohingahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thimlich_Ohinga

And then in Tanzania you have the Gerezani Fort in Kilwa Kisiwani, the Old Fort of Zanzibar, the German Fort in Bagamoyo. And then Taleh Fort in Somalia.

I have not even started on either Mozambique, or Angola.

The importance of the definition is to actually save the castles. For example in Lower Silesia in Poland, which was Germany, and Czech before, there where about 2000 Castles (Schloss's). Now many of these castles lay in ruins. By only including the popular ones like this map does it means the less famous ones will become even less popular, and a piece of history will disappear.

An Italian friend was excited to visit a castle, and on arrival disappointedly exclaimed "but this is a "fortezza!".

In our tiny little village of 2000 people, we have 4 small castles (chateaux). Next one also has some. So does next one.

Its fine if its not exhaustive list. All major I could think of in few european countries I could find with all info correctly. Thank you for this effort, much appreciated.

I hope I don't get into hot water here, but (without knowing the buildings you are referring to) one person's large villa/mansion can be another person's small chateau, so I'd argue that probably not all small chateaux have to be included :)

As the other commenter said: Europe is filled to the brim with fortifications and castles. It's almost pointless to make a complete map - every second place will have one. So I agree with the approach of having a selection. But how to select? Here of course everybody will disagree - on one hand we surely have the obvious and well known tourist hotspots, but on the other hand basically everything else can fall under "hidden gems". Transylvania only has over 150 such fortified churches... what can you do with so much raw information?

Hi there and thank you, I guess we all love castles.

Just went to check a few randomly and saw the map lacks the Citadel of Acre, which is really quite impressive https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Attraction_Review-g297736-d324... (It's in Akko, northern Israel)

hope that will help you find and fix some other misses in your dataset.

Again! Thank you everyone! The feedback really helps.

I am slowly but surely fixing based from the feedback I get here om Hacker News.

I am citing the users on the changelog a way to show my thanks: https://thecastlemap.com/changelog/

I am going outside to stay out in the sun for a bit now:)

I am going to the Akershus festning! This is my local castle and the view is crazy

Missing one of my favorite in USA which I will not mention here because it is unofficially open to the public and i don't want that to change...

At the moment the project is going viral. I am so thankful from everyone!

It sucks that I cannot properly communicate because feedback is spread on the internet, which is making it really hard to address them.

Therefore I will put my X account here for those who are interested: https://x.com/Flightmussy

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.

In France castles are all called Châteaux.

What a coincidence! In France, all hats are called chapeaux!

What is the point of the x at the end?

Makes things more difficult for foreigners. The French consider this a feature.

Telling that "eau" is just "o" for pronunciation confuse foreigners even more. Some of then even thinks you are mocking them.

Yet somehow French still manages to be altogether more coherent than English… or at least that’s the impression I’ve had so far.

Inferring pronunciation from spelling is very regular in French; the reverse, not so: there may be many ways to spell a sound like “o”, each with a different meaning.

Being more coherent than English is not exactly a high bar to clear...

(at least when it comes to languages based on the Latin script)

That is an extremely strong claim that I simply cannot support. English is beautiful elegantly designed and trivial to learn compared to french.

Also, if you talk on some mid level (say B1, which takes a LOT of effort for french language), you are not going to get laughed at and ridiculed when using it in UK/US/Australia/NZ etc with english. A very common experience in France when trying to use french (I go there every other weekend, its just across the border). Folks from other parts of former french empire like quebecois or corsicans are much more approachable in this and tolerant. Suffice to say their language variant is often mocked by mainland french too, I think personally parisians are the most cocky ones.

Does it also apply to independent "eau" word in fragrance or perfume, like "eau" de toilet?

it shows the plural,

un chapeau, des chapeaux -> one hat, hats

But you don’t pronounce it and in your example you know it’s plural without the x.

I would say it’s technical debt but rest assured that the language is alive and will eventually drop the x. Perhaps we will have a s instead of a x first.

It does change sound sometimes based on the following word.

Who downvotes this..?

Thanks for the feedback. I will try my best to fix the dataset.

In Castilla y León it is showing 9 castles and we have more than 300, hence the name Castilla...

We can see it as a curated collection of castles.

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.

I can confirm that a lot of castles missing in Germany too

Same in France, where I grew up almost all small village have a castle that is multiple century old.

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.

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.

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.

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”.

Same for France, many are missing

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....

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.

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.

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!)

For Sweden it’s the opposite problem. We don’t have many castles, most of the ones labeled are old monasteries or I guess you would say small palaces.

You have to start somewhere? Google maps didn't start with a full dataset either...

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?

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.

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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48861309

Hi that is me! Now I guess I have to fix the project and make it proper.

If you do so, please include Esslingen castle (Germany). It's still standing and they have a lovely (and famous with Americans) Christmas market there.https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esslinger_Burg

I love this project, like you I'm a big castle fan and tourist.

I love that the annual snow castle in Kemi, Finland, is included =D https://thecastlemap.com/castles/snowcastle-of-kemi/

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.

https://thecastlemap.com/

Peer’s Certificate issuer is not recognized.

HTTP Strict Transport Security: false HTTP Public Key Pinning: false

Certificate chain:

Probably something on your end, it is using a normal letsencrypt cert

Huh .. strange. I was behind my university's firewall

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!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Charlotte_(Nassau)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_of_Wales_Fort

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!

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

And Casa Loma is only a castle in the same sense as the one at Disneyworld. These may be textually and superficially similar to historic castles but are completely different. A knowledgable historian would not curate this list. The author should indicate this is just a technical demonstration.

Hi again! It is insane how much castlemap has been talked on the internet.

I am still working on the project, but it is more on the correction part rather than adding new castles.

The goal is to both have quality content and at the same time still make the website fun to use.

Internet is supposed to be fun, interesting and free, not corporate bullshit and boring.

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.

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?

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...

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.

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.

The North American bits are a little weird. Colorado has an entry for Bent's Fort but not for Fort Vasquez, though both are rebuilt tourist attractions. Then there's Bishop's Castle, an actual norman style castle built outside of Pueblo by some crazed guy

Fort Dearborn in Chicago has a dot, even though no structure exists and it's only a series of plaques on the street now.

As someone who runs something similar, but for stained glass I'm going to go against the grain here and commend you on your data set. I think a lot of posters here are unfamiliar with how time consuming gathering these datapoints can be. It's mostly by hand, mostly by randomly searching or scrolling through Wikipedia, stumbling upon a partial data set, or physically traveling and having first hand knowledge that a place exists. How were you able to put together such a GREAT dataset?

You could add the facility for visitors to add their own locations or submit them for review. That way the people who "know something is missing" can add it themselves.

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!

It’s cool. One issue I have is that the colours for “Castle & château” and “Ruin” are very similar.

When you tap a marker often you can’t see the castle in the photo because it’s cropped to fit a rectangle with an unusual aspect ratio. That element should be allowed to adjust its height so the image is scaled at its own aspect ratio rather than cropped. Eg you can only see the mounds of Berwick Castle and Bamburgh Castle in the North East of England.

Also this one should be included: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caisteal_Maol

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).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krak_des_Chevaliers

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.

First, hat tip for this gorgeous website. Very well made. The UX is lovely.

Looking at Tokyo, Japan, I see that Hama-rikyū Gardens is included. Wiki says:

    > The main palace at Hama was destroyed by fire in 1724, and has not been rebuilt since.

Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hama-riky%C5%AB_Gardens

As I understand, it is a beautiful garden, not a castle.

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.

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

The page does give a pointer to Wikidata, I for one would love to see your example included.

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.

I am working on fixing the site. It is vibe coded which I understand is a problem. Ai took my career path so I have use it as well although I fucking hate AI. I like creating stuff though.

I have only used English Wikipedia for putting castles on the map. To some degrees using Wikipedia of other languages will fix the problem partially (Which some of you have suggested). The ultimate fix would be a community who does all the suggestions, because all datasets are wrong anyways.

The claim that France does have 45k castles is just so wrong lol. Yes the site does miss many castles and some are defined wrong. I am working on that and I am really thankful for all the suggestions which will be credited in the changelog: https://thecastlemap.com/changelog/

Anyways I am working on the site and updating it rather quickly because I never thought people wanted a castle site.

I have added more landmarks, but are not yet filtered correctly. Will fix that asap.

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.

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

Wrong title. Wrong not even by two orders of magnitude.

There are only 20 castles in the world?

That's less than I expected for worldwide

Apparently Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, etc... were not really into castles, while Japan was?

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?

I suspect the Mongols destroyed a lot of Asian castles and city fortifications. They never made it to Japan.

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.

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.

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.

Hungary has more than a lot missing https://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magyarorsz%C3%A1gi_v%C3%A1rak_...

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.

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

Is this anything more substantial than a weekend-coded public data scrape?

It's worse than that, the underlying data is more than questionable.

Missing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanbrugh_Castle

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'

I'll have to look these up! The staff definitely strongly proclaim that Dalhousie is the oldest. I wonder why they omit these

Hey, so, I know everyone is complaining about their favourite castle/fortress/palace missing but... it's missing the Acropolis.

The Acropolis, in Athens. There's no more famous castle than that. Or fortress, whatever you want to call it.

I get that this is vibe coded but I really wonder how the data was compiled. This will take serious effort to fix if it's so deficient it doesn't include the most famous castle of all. And I don't mean it will take iterating the vibe coding, this needs serious knowledge work that I don't think an LLM is sufficient for, sorry.

Bro. The Acropolis is a temple.

"Bro", the Parthenon is a temple. The Acropolis is a citadel.

The Acropolis of Athens (Ancient Greek: ἡ Ἀκρόπολις τῶν Ἀθηνῶν, romanized: hē Akropolis tōn Athēnōn; Modern Greek: Ακρόπολη Αθηνών, romanized: Akrópoli Athinón) is an ancient citadel located on a rocky outcrop above the city of Athens, Greece, and contains the remains of several ancient buildings of great architectural and historical significance, the most famous being the Parthenon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acropolis_of_Athens

In fact, that's what "acropolis" (small a) means: it's Greek for "citadel".

And what is a "citadel"?

The distinction does make sense, as castles (formally speaking) are medieval structures, but clearly that didn't matter because the map has other ancient acropoleis. Even putting that aside, the relationship between 'aκρόπολη' and 'castle' is a pretty trivial latent feature that a transformer is literally, mathematically designed to capture. Briefly interrogated an LLM on the matter and they struggled with the classification too. Definitely an interesting failure point. I wonder if it's because of semantic dilution. Like, because the training data had so much on the Athens acropolis which is non-castle related, that the fact ended up living in a long tail for that specific acropolis. I bet a higher precision model wouldn't have done this. Quantization sucks!

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.

The ones in the area where I used to live are all missing.

I think it's cool. Having lived in Jordan for a while I see there are some missing castles there. I will look into adding them in Wikidata.

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

I love this, but it's a nightmare trying to click on a link in the popovers as they try to escape from your pointer.

There's many more castles in Ireland than you showed. Orgs like the Office of Public Works would have a list.

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.

Immediately curious about the concentration of castles on the Ghanaian coast. Wonder what that's about.

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.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmerston_Forts

Also found this

https://castles.tello.app

Feature suggestion: A filter to search for castles of a specific size (e.g. over 20 acres)

Really luke it, but on mobile (firefox) the links (to wikipedia etc) just don't work..

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

Excellent usecase of map and history. Request to add a year range selector or slider

This is missing castles. There are several in and near lerici Italy not listed

Is a palace a castle? If so then there are a huge number missing in India.

https://fortmapper.in/

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?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C3%A2teau_Frontenac

They use a crappy model I guess. This reeks AI.

I see Casa Loma in there now, but if that counts I'd expect something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boldt_Castle to also count

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.

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)

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.

Seems like it's missing a lot for Switzerland.

Interesting, still I miss most castles around me.

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.

Australia doesn’t have a single castle!

Who would've built them before modern Australia started to exist tho?

South Africa has one on the map...

Dutch were there as early as in 1652

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.

very cool. some feedback: tricky to mouse over the tooltip to click links within the tooltip

still missing castel del monte, in puglia - italy.

it's on the 1¢ coins here!!

missing a lot of amazing federician castles in Apulia, Italy

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.

Thats here. https://fortmapper.in/

Where is the castle of James Damore?

Heavily lacking at least in Poland. Reeks clanker powered. I miss the times where actual hobbyists were doing stuff.

Slop

Why is the communist-built national assembly building in Ljubljana, Slovenia on the list here? A bunch of missing castles, but then a commie style building from 1959 comes on the map?

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, 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.

Neuschwanstein was completed in 1886. Undeniably a very archetypal castle. So much so that of course it was the basis for Disney's Sleeping Beauty castle, which opened at Disneyland in Anaheim in 1955 - at which time the castle it took its inspiration from was not even 70 years old.

Now Disney's Sleeping Beauty castle is itself over 70 years old, making it arguably just as much a historical 'castle' as Neuschwanstein.

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

Yeah they are pretty loose w/ Castle. It is a case of "mi casa" not always "tu casa" [1].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casa_del_Fascio_(Como)

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.

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