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....

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!)

Side question: why does Claude prefer dark backgrounds with low-contrast text?

>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

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.

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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

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.

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

https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q63495355

EDIT: ah, it's only those with an english wikipedia page, nevermind

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.

Brazil also has a few castles, although not sure if they are classified differently -- https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lista_de_castelos_no_Brasil

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!

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

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

https://castles.tello.app

If you want to leave a legacy, build something out of stone.

I checked my local area, and it omits interesting castles, instead including palaces, landmarks and world war era fortresses.

Shameful submission.

it's on the 1¢ coins here!!

Plymouth is surrounded by them.

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

But the links don't work.

(firefox mobile)

Even more ridiculous : Bastille also reported as "renowned ruin". Nothing remains. All stones have disappeared centuries ago.

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.

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

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.

"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.

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.