Preparing for a pub quiz or a future spot on a TV gameshow? If the topic is castles, we’ve got you covered.
Castlemap is a new, free interactive tool plotting 6,653 castles, fortresses and palaces across 140 countries. Every single entry features a real photo, its founding century and a bite-sized history.
Every landmark on Castlemap must earn its spot. If the creators had logged every fortification on Earth, Europe alone would be buried under tens of thousands of pins. Instead, they curated 6,653 of the world’s most significant sites across 140 countries, keeping the map clean and easy to navigate.
The project is built on open and crowd-sourced data, pulling coordinates from Wikidata, imagery from Wikimedia Commons, and histories from Wikipedia. Crucially, the system scans 22 non-English Wikipedia editions. This means a German Burg or an Italian castello with no English documentation can still claim its rightful place on the map.
Fans of GeoGuessr will be pleased to know there’s also a built-in ‘CastleGuessr’, where you’re presented with a random photo and have to pin it on a world map.
Which country has the most landmarks?
While many assume castles are a strictly European obsession, the global leaderboard tells a different story. Spain leads the world with 500 landmarks (that includes fortresses, palaces and ruins, as well as castles), followed closely by Germany with 471 and France with 452. However, Japan beats England on the leaderboard, with 297 landmarks to England’s 265.
The top spot on the map goes to the Great Wall of China. To determine this, the site uses a custom ‘fame score’ that calculates popularity by balancing how widely a fortress is written about across multiple languages with the number of page views it receives from real readers.
If your castle knowledge starts and ends with the silhouette on the Disney logo, this map is the perfect rabbit hole for a lazy afternoon. And on that note, the iconic Disney profile was directly modelled on Germany’s Neuschwanstein Castle. Many of these mapped sites offer much more than just a pretty view.
Here is our guide to UK castles you can actually stay in, from a fortified medieval tower to a sweeping country estate.
Fancy planning a proper castle-hopping trip? Here’s ‘s guide to the most beautiful places in Europe, several of which come with a fairytale fortress or two attached.
Plus: The full list of the 25 new UNESCO World Heritage Sites for 2026.
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