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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....

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.

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

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

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

This is off by many degrees of magnitude for Ireland at least: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1nkvqd7/oc...

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!)

missing a lot of amazing federician castles in Apulia, Italy

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.

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

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 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.

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

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

https://thecastlemap.com/

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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

My first dotcom began by listing German castles for sale after the wall fell. https://web.archive.org/web/19970102101502/http://www.re.com...

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!

This dataset is bad. The North Carolina state capitol is a castle?

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.

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

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...

still missing castel del monte, in puglia - italy.

it's on the 1¢ coins here!!

Also found this

https://castles.tello.app

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.

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

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.

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!

That's less than I expected for worldwide

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

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

See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44948352

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

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

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

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.

Clicking on full story doesn't do anything. It closes the popup (mobile android)

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Italy, like Germany, Austria and maybe a few more European countries host more than 5,000 "castles".

Since forts are included in the USA, there are loads of Napoleonic forts missing in the UK.

Plymouth is surrounded by them.

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

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

Hearst Castle Missing. Please add it, it’s probably the most famous castle in California.

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

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

Seems like it's missing a lot for Switzerland.

Interesting that in Canada Rideau Hall counts, but Casa Loma does not.

Would be amazing to see which one of these are on sale.

Interesting, still I miss most castles around me.

Love it..

But the links don't work.

(firefox mobile)

Invading Australia is looking pretty tempting right now.

Australia doesn’t have a single castle!

None in Ausralia?

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.

There are many castles near my parents house in france. I don't see any of them? AI generated?

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Where is the castle of James Damore?

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

Slop

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

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.

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.

[flagged]

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.