alt Hacker NewsThe World's 2,400 Castles
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This is off by many degrees of magnitude for Ireland at least: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1nkvqd7/oc...
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.
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....
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!)
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?
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!
Very cool project, but obviously missing (too) many great castles. I'm not sure if that way of measuring popularity is really well done.
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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!
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.
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.
Excellent usecase of map and history. Request to add a year range selector or slider
That's less than I expected for worldwide
Apparently Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, etc... were not really into castles, while Japan was?
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...
Seems like it's missing a lot for Switzerland.
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.
Is this anything more substantial than a weekend-coded public data scrape?
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.
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!
This dataset is bad. The North Carolina state capitol is a castle?
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.
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 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
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
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.
Italy, like Germany, Austria and maybe a few more European countries host more than 5,000 "castles".
Clicking on full story doesn't do anything. It closes the popup (mobile android)
Since forts are included in the USA, there are loads of Napoleonic forts missing in the UK.
Plymouth is surrounded by them.
The ones in the area where I used to live are all missing.
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.
Interesting, still I miss most castles around me.
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
Immediately curious about the concentration of castles on the Ghanaian coast. Wonder what that's about.
Hungary has more than a lot missing https://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magyarorsz%C3%A1gi_v%C3%A1rak_...
Interesting that in Canada Rideau Hall counts, but Casa Loma does not.
This is missing castles. There are several in and near lerici Italy not listed
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?
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).
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.