The Castle Map: 3,708 Fortresses, One Open-Data Atlas
The Castle Map is exactly what it sounds like: a night-mode interactive map with 3,708 of the world’s great castles, fortresses, and palaces plotted across 131 countries. Click any point and you get a photo, founding century, and quick facts. Open the landmark’s page for coordinates and the full story.
The dataset is built entirely from open data: Wikidata for facts and coordinates, Wikimedia Commons for photos, Wikipedia for stories, OpenFreeMap and Natural Earth for the basemap. Every landmark has a real photo, a Wikipedia article, and exact coordinates. This is the curation bar: if it doesn’t have all three, it doesn’t make the cut.
The breakdown: 1,713 castles, 554 fortresses, 759 palaces and châteaux, and 682 ruins. Italy leads with 294, followed by France (276), Germany (253), Spain (180), Poland (163), and England (160). The atlas explicitly balances across countries so the map stays explorable. If if it plotted every fortification in Europe alone, you’d see nothing but dots in Germany.
Each castle has a fame score based on its Wikipedia sitelink count, or how many language editions cover it. Palace of Versailles ranks #1, followed by the Forbidden City, Château de Montsoreau, the Acropolis, the Kremlin, and the Alhambra. It’s a clean proxy for global renown, and the ranking is published in full with the methodology explained.
You can download the complete dataset as GeoJSON or CSV (CC0). Someone who wants to build a castle-visiting app, overlay the data on their own map, or run statistics on castle density by country can do it in one click. The dataset is the product as much as the map itself.
Missing a castle you know? The map refreshes from Wikidata. Improve the Wikidata entry with exact coordinates, a Commons photo, and a Wikipedia article in any of the dozen languages the atlas reads, and it becomes eligible for the next refresh. Your edit improves every atlas built on open data, not just this one.
The takeaway: This is what curated open data can do. A single person (or small team) can build a worldwide atlas that would have needed a national geographic institute a generation ago. The full dataset is free. The hard part (verifying 3,708 landmarks), is done.
Related TMFNK Content
- Infrastructure Maps: Four Ways to See the World’s Power Grid Another curated data map of a specific category, though one you’d rather not see in person.
- SearchWhole.Earth: The Digitally Resurrected Whole Earth Catalog Similar ethos: one person curating the world’s interesting things into a browsable atlas.
- OpenGlobes Space: What’s in Space Right Now A different kind of map; what’s orbiting overhead, visualized in real time.
Crepi il lupo!