Every user-visible change to the castle atlas, newest first.
2,338 landmarks whose page told a single line now tell their whole article. Wherever the English Wikipedia lead ran under 400 characters, the atlas now reads the entire article — the history sections, not just the definition — and the page's story budget doubles to fit it. Karlštejn , which introduced itself in one sentence, now carries five paragraphs of Charles IV, the Imperial Regalia and the…
The year-reading pass learned Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Hungarian, Czech, Slovak, Turkish, Greek, Japanese, Chinese and Korean — and 333 more landmarks now state their founding , read from their own articles, never guessed (dated coverage: 66% → 71%). The chain finds dates where you would not look: Sacsayhuamán 's Killke origin around 1100 arrived via the Czech article, Stirling 's…
A "castle" built after 1800 is almost never a castle — the age of castles was over — and this release acts on it. Every castle-category landmark dated after 1800 was re-read against its own encyclopaedia lead, and forty moved to the palace category : Schwerin , whose German name has said Schloss all along; Miramare , a Habsburg seaside residence; Peckforton, "a Victorian country house built in the…
Nobody reported any of this. Every fix below came out of an audit the atlas ran on itself — and the method is the part worth writing down, because the old one had quietly stopped working. Previous sweeps read each landmark's NAME and its one-line description, which is how a wall, a bunker and a city of a quarter of a million people all reached the top hundred wearing the word castle. This sweep…
The night chart had a real problem and a reviewer was right to say so. Keir Clarke of Maps Mania wrote that the map was barely legible, and it measured: the land was separated from the sea by a contrast ratio of 1.21 to 1, where three to one is the floor for a graphic that carries meaning. Finding the Adriatic or the Gulf of Bothnia meant already knowing where they were. The land is lighter now,…
Open one of these maps in a background tab, leave it a few seconds and then switch to it, and the atlas had quietly settled for its plainest basemap — country outlines, no coastlines, no relief, no place names — and stayed there for the rest of the visit. A browser does not draw a tab nobody is looking at, and the map library assembles every style inside a drawing step, so in the waiting tab…
The game had no board. Yesterday gave the atlas real relief, and the game builds its board out of the atlas’s own style with every label stripped away — so it inherited the new hillshade layer and left the elevation source behind. MapLibre discards an entire style over a single layer pointing at a source that is not there, and by then the working one has been taken down: the result was a…
Fame was being judged in English. The ranking blends how widely a landmark is documented with how widely it is read , and the reading half counted English Wikipedia only — so a castle whose article exists in Polish, German or Spanish and nowhere else scored zero readers , and sank. That was 1,408 landmarks, one in five on the atlas . Readership is now summed across every language edition a…
The Dutch atlas now reads Dutch. 3,961 landmark stories that had been standing in English on /nl/ were translated, so Dutch was the last edition where a reader could meet a castle in a language they had not asked for. With it goes the last machine-translation notice on the site: no edition carries one now, because none of them needs to — each translated story says so in its own credit line, which…
CastleGuessr is now the one game its name promised — the shape proven on our sister atlas FilmMap . The daily puzzle and the endless typing rounds are gone, autocomplete and all. Every round asks the same clean question: here is the castle, name and photo — where does it stand? One tap on the world map answers, scored out of 5,000 by how close you land, and the reveal draws the line from your tap…
On Menéame, yarkyark looked at the fame ranking and said the quiet part: castles nobody has heard of ranked high, “and the Alhambra doesn’t show up” . He was right, and it was worse than it looked: a refresh two days earlier had silently dropped the readership numbers for 5,807 of the atlas’s landmarks, so fame was being judged on Wikipedia coverage alone — Spain’s…
What happened to the Japanese edition yesterday has now happened to four more. 9,844 landmark descriptions that opened in English on the German, Spanish, French and Polish editions have been translated: 1,643 in German, 2,587 in Spanish, 1,878 in French and 3,736 in Polish. Together with yesterday’s Japanese, five of this atlas’s seven editions now tell every story they can in the…
Since the Japanese edition opened in July, it has carried an honest compromise: where no Japanese Wikipedia article existed, the page told its story in English — and said so. That compromise ends today. 4,122 pages now open in Japanese, machine-translated from the English Wikipedia lead each page has always credited, joining the 2,199 landmarks whose Japanese Wikipedia tells their story natively.…
The guessing game grew a second way to answer: the world itself. A night map of every landmark now sits under the photo — tap anywhere and the nearest castle dot becomes your guess, answered as ever with distance, direction and closeness, and every try leaves a colored ring behind showing how you closed in. Typing a name works exactly as before. And midnight no longer ends the game: a new endless…
When this atlas reached the Hacker News front page in July, the sharpest criticism was coverage: Castilla y León showed nine castles where some three hundred stand, and Germany, Ireland, Sweden and Jordan were nearly as thin. Today’s release is that promise kept, and the mechanism matters: the same country-scoped Wikidata sweep that once opened China now runs for Spain, Germany,…
A thread on Lemmy’s map community did what good threads do: it found the blind spots. The sharpest came from @groet@feddit.org — Peru’s mountains are covered in Inca ruins, and this atlas held four Peruvian entries. The cause was the citadel lesson all over again: Wikidata types the great Andean sites “archaeological site”, a sibling of every class the atlas sweeps, so no…
Every page of this atlas now exists in French at /fr/ — all 5,793 landmark pages, 138 country pages, every ranking, the city day-trip guides, the statistics, data and about pages, and the daily game. It is the seventh language; the switcher now runs English → 日本語 → Deutsch → Español → Français → Polski → Nederlands. French Wikipedia covers this subject like almost no other edition: 3,394 landmarks…
Every page of this atlas now exists in Spanish at /es/ — all 5,793 landmark pages, 138 country pages, every ranking, the statistics, the free-data page and the daily game. It is the sixth language, and the language switch now runs English → 日本語 → Deutsch → Español → Polski → Nederlands. What is genuinely Spanish is the landmark itself wherever Spanish Wikipedia has an article — 2,581 of them,…
A day after German and Dutch got their articles, an audit caught English dropping its own: pages said “Castles in Czech Republic” and “in United States”. Seven of the atlas’s countries carry “the” in English — the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, the United States, the Philippines, the Dominican Republic, the United Arab Emirates and the Democratic…
German and Dutch cannot drop the definite article the way this site did: it said “ist Chinesische Mauer” where a German reader expects die Chinesische Mauer. Which names take an article is not guessable — die Alhambra does, Schloss Neuschwanstein does not — so the atlas now reads it from the opening words of each landmark’s own German or Dutch Wikipedia article, where native…
Several sentences on this site named a landmark or a country in prose, and the data moved on without them. The homepage FAQ said the Palace of Versailles ranked #1; it has been second since the Chinese intake put the Great Wall of China above it. The statistics page said Scotland led the world in castles per head among countries of more than five million people; Slovakia does, with 23.3 per…
Every page of this atlas now exists in Dutch at /nl/ — all 5,793 landmark pages, 138 country pages, 240 day-trip city guides, every ranking, the statistics, the free-data page and the daily game. It is the fifth language beside English, German, Japanese and Polish, and it is a complete mirror: nothing quietly falls back to an English page. What is genuinely Dutch is the landmark itself where Dutch…
Laura Jenny reviewed this map for Bright and made one complaint: “Al zijn sommige omschrijvingen wel heel summier: van ‘gebouwd tijdens de Spaanse inquisitie’ tot ‘kasteel’.” Some descriptions are very sparse — from “built during the Spanish Inquisition” down to, simply, “castle”. She was right, and it was worse than she could see from the outside: 387 landmarks carried no description at all, and…
Sweden had 89 castles on this map and 19 palaces. Among the castles were Tjolöholm , an Arts-and-Crafts country house finished in 1904, and a long row of Skåne manor houses whose own English Wikipedia articles open with the words “is a manor house”. 128 landmarks have moved to Palace & château, and Sweden now reads 62 castles to 46 palaces. The cause is a translation. Swedish slott , Danish slot ,…
China had eighteen landmarks on this map — fewer than Luxembourg, which is three thousand times smaller. It now has a hundred and twenty, and the Great Wall of China is among them. It is, by some distance, the most-read landmark in the whole atlas. The cause was not missing articles or missing photographs. It was that Wikidata does not file Chinese fortifications as castles: at this atlas’s…
Polish joins English, German and Japanese as a full edition: the map , every castle page, all 131 countries, the 237 city guides, the rankings, the statistics and the changelog. Castle descriptions come from the Polish Wikipedia where it has an article. The language switcher now shows a flag rather than a two-letter code, which was cramped on a phone and unreadable on Windows, where emoji flags…
A reader on Neatorama , Cluck2, wrote that the atlas was “missing data even when the data is part of the data set they claim to be using” and named Fort Delaware . They were right: it is typed a fort in Wikidata, it has a photograph and a coordinate, and it is read some sixteen thousand times a year — it was missing only because four Wikipedia editions cover it, and the atlas fills…
This changelog is in Japanese now — all twenty-nine entries, not only the newest — and the Japanese page carries its own headings and date format. That is the visible half of a less visible fix: every ranking and list page was still printing castle names in English on the German and Japanese editions. The fame ranking , the oldest and medieval lists, the by-country pages, the big compare table and…
A landmark enters this atlas when eight Wikipedia language editions cover it. That is a fair rule for a world map and a poor judge of Japan, where a castle can be famous for four hundred years and written up in exactly one language. s.ogawa named the measure that Japan actually uses: what a Japanese reader means by “castle” runs as far as 日本100名城 and 続日本100名城 — the hundred castles the…
The most-repeated question in the Hacker News thread was never really about a missing castle: it was “what is your definition, and why is it applied so inconsistently?” The atlas had no answer anywhere on the site. It does now — the About page states the rule plainly. Castle & château is a fortified residence, fortress & fort is built for a garrison rather than a household, palace is a…
The atlas now speaks Japanese. Every page — the map, all 3,700+ castle pages, the country and ranking pages — has a Japanese edition , with castle names and histories drawn from Japanese Wikipedia where they exist. All 155 Japanese castles, from Himeji to Osaka , read in native Japanese; landmarks without a Japanese article fall back to English. It joins the German edition — switch languages from…
The atlas can now answer the question people actually ask: what castles are near me? 237 city guides — from London and Munich to Kyoto and Jaipur — each listing every landmark within 100 km of the city centre: the closest, the most famous, the oldest, and all the rest in day-trip bands, each with its straight-line distance and compass direction. Border cities show their whole circle honestly —…
Italy’s most embarrassing absence is fixed: Castel del Monte — Frederick II’s octagonal crown, a UNESCO site, the castle on Italy’s 1-cent coin — was invisible to the atlas because Wikidata now types it as a set of museum classes, not a castle; no castle query could ever find it. It is joined by its Hohenstaufen kin Castello Svevo in Bari , the sea-front castle of Trani and the…
The all-castles page and every country page are picture browsers now: each landmark as a card with its photo, century, fame rank and a one-sentence story, most famous first — the same format as our sister atlas’s route browser. Ruin detection got sharper, in four passes — the last one auditing Wikidata’s own ruin typing for every landmark. The classifier now reads the freshly fetched…
The sharpest criticism in the Hacker News thread was aimed exactly right: requiring an English Wikipedia article kept whole regions off the map — a Burg documented only on German Wikipedia, or a castello only on Italian, could never enter. The atlas now sweeps twelve more editions (German, French, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Romanian, Hungarian, Portuguese, Dutch and Greek) alongside…
On the map now: the Acropolis of Athens (the ancient citadel itself), Caisteal Maol on Skye, Boldt Castle in the Thousand Islands, Jim Bishop’s Bishop Castle in Colorado (removed again on 2026-08-08 — see that day’s entry), Fort Point under the Golden Gate Bridge, the Dover Western Heights , the Esslinger Burg , and four Romanian strongholds — the Fortress of Arad , Oradea Citadel ,…
Until today a landmark dated “13th century” was excluded from the oldest-castles ranking so an approximation could never pose as precise. That was honest but too timid — it silently hid genuinely ancient sites. Approximate dates now rank everywhere: oldest , medieval , oldest in every country , the statistics and the big compare table — always marked “c.”, and sorting after…
The hover card’s links were unreachable — the card vanished the moment the cursor left the dot. It now waits: a short grace period, and the card holds itself open while your pointer is over it, so “Full story” and Wikipedia are one hover and a click away. Thanks to bwhiting2356 . Ruins are heather-violet now. The old slate blue sat too close to both the castle cream and the…
Wikidata leaves about 40% of the atlas without a founding year. Where a landmark’s Wikipedia lead states when it was built, that year is now read in — 316 more castles are dated, bringing the atlas to roughly three-quarters. Only a date the source actually states is used; the rest stay undated rather than guessed. Century-level or hedged dates (a “13th-century castle”,…
Five castles you told us were missing are on the map now: Hearst Castle in California, Toronto’s Casa Loma , the Citadelle of Québec and the Halifax Citadel , and Larnach Castle — New Zealand’s only castle, which brings the atlas to 130 countries. Thanks to makeusgreat , guyzero , yabones and kinow . Two entries that aren’t castles are gone: the North Carolina State Capitol…
On a phone, tapping a castle now opens its card and keeps its links working. The “Full story” and Wikipedia links used to do nothing on mobile — a tap was read as a hover and closed the card instead of opening it. Reported by samfar90 and BasieP2 . Where dots crowd together, a tap now picks the nearest castle rather than whatever happened to sit on top — so you no longer…
New page: the medieval castles of the world — every landmark in the atlas with a documented founding year in the Middle Ages, roughly 500 to 1500, the most famous first and then the full chronological table. It sits next to Oldest on the rankings hub. It is the cut a plain “castle” search never gives you: the ancient citadels drop out below 500, and the 19th-century revival…
The oldest-castles ranking now crowns each category separately: the ten oldest castles , fortresses , palaces and ruins , each in its own anchored section — Nero’s Domus Aurea (AD 64) leads the palaces, Zerzevan (c. 400) the ruins. And a new page alongside it: the oldest castle in every country — one national champion per country, oldest first, with the full alphabetical table.…
New page: the oldest castles in the world — every landmark with a documented founding year, ranked oldest-first, from the Bronze-Age Avranlo Fortress and the 8th-century-BC Erebuni to the present. It sits next to Ranked in the menu. Building it exposed 26 Wikidata founding years that were really renovation or heritage-designation dates — the Tang-dynasty Daming Palace claimed 2010, Chapultepec…
Every content page widened from a 928 px shell to 1,280 px, the same footprint as our newest atlases. Paragraphs keep their readable measure — it’s the country grids, fact panels, ranking tables and castle photos that use the new room.
A follow-up to today’s label fixes: 142 more landmarks that Wikipedia itself defines as ruins now carry the Ruin chip — Heidelberg (“is a ruin… landmark of Heidelberg”), Vlad the Impaler’s Poenari , Alamut , the Cathar Peyrepertuse , Tantallon and much of the great Slovak and Czech hilltop family ( Čachtice , Trosky …). Ruins grew from 119 to 261. The rule…
Wikidata often types a fortress as a “castle”, and the atlas used to trust that typing over the monument’s own name — so Kufstein Fortress wore a castle chip. The categoriser now lets an unambiguous name win: 68 landmarks became fortresses (from Hohensalzburg and the Citadel of Aleppo to the Château d’If , a fortress despite the château, and the Moscow Kremlin ), and 15…
Four Norwegian fortresses joined the atlas after @42@snabelen.no pointed out on Mastodon that they were missing — Kongsvinger , the fortified old town of Fredrikstad , Tønsberg Fortress above Norway’s oldest town, and Oscarsborg , whose guns sank the cruiser Blücher in April 1940. Thank you! India grew from 71 to 80 landmarks after @vibhurishi@social.linux.pizza noted the country was thin,…
The atlas learned to play: Guess the Castle shows one castle photo a day — drawn from the 500 most famous — and gives you six guesses. Every miss zooms the photo out and answers with the distance and compass direction from your guess to the answer, because every guess is a real castle on the map. Streaks and stats live in your browser only (no account, like everything here), and the result copies…
The whole site moved from the launch palette (dark navy + amber gold) to ink, bone and verdigris — closer to an antique sea-chart. The honest reason: readers whose taste we respect said the old colours looked machine-made. Matt Muir in Web Curios put it with the most style: lose “the horrible orange/brown look”, gain “some vague semblance of humanity”. He had a point. New favicon and social-share…