Map style
Loaded—castles & forts
Visible—match your filters
Oldest found——
Most common——
Querying OpenStreetMap…
Connecting…
Connecting…
Every castle, ruin, fortress, palace, and fortification tagged in OpenStreetMap across Europe. From Roman-era hillforts to 18th-century stately homes. The data is community-maintained and growing.
Markers are automatically colour-coded by estimated construction period based on available date tags: Roman (purple), Early Medieval (red), High Medieval (orange), Late Medieval (yellow), Renaissance (cyan), and Modern (green). Clusters are drawn as rings that show the era mix inside them.
Filter by one or more eras and castle types, or search by name. Switch to the heat map to see where castles concentrate, and pick a dark, light, satellite or terrain map style.
Open any castle to see its type, era, architect and heritage status, plus Wikipedia, Wikidata, website, satellite and OSM links. Castles with a Wikipedia article also show a photo and a short introduction.
Press F or the full-screen button to give the whole map your screen. The panel, filters and details stay on top of the map, and it works on phones and tablets too.
All castle data comes from the OpenStreetMap database via the Overpass API. A saved copy of each country opens straight from this site for speed, and you can refresh it live from OpenStreetMap at any time. No accounts, no fees, no tracking. The map uses Leaflet.js with marker clustering for smooth browsing even with tens of thousands of points.
Germany has the most castles in Europe (~25,000), followed by France, the UK, Italy, and Spain. Wales has the highest density per square mile. The Rhine, Loire, and Danube valleys are legendary castle corridors.
Everything runs in your browser. The Overpass query goes directly to OSM's public API and map tiles come from Esri. Your searches, filters and clicks stay on your device. Free, private, and open.
Click one of the 37 country bubbles on the map or in the list (each shows a count or a rough estimate), or type its name. When a saved copy of that country is available it opens in a moment; otherwise the page asks the OpenStreetMap Overpass API for every historic=castle, fort or fortress in the country's bounding box, which can take a while for large countries (you can cancel). Refresh live in the panel re-queries OpenStreetMap.
The cards on the map show Loaded, Visible (matching your filters), Oldest found (the earliest year tagged in OSM, with its name) and the Most common type with its share.
Tap one or more Era rows (Roman <500 up to Modern 1700+) and Type chips (Fortress, Palace, Manor, Tower, Ruins, Castle, Other), or type in Search castle name. Counts, map and list update instantly.
Rings show how many castles are in an area and the mix of eras inside; zoom in to split them, and from zoom level 16 every castle is its own icon, coloured by era. Click one for its detail card. Use the tools on the right for heat map, map style, a random castle and full screen.
The list shows the matching castles A–Z (or oldest first), up to 500 at a time. Click one to fly to it and open its card. ← back returns to the country map, and the link button copies a link that opens the same country.
start_date, year_of_construction, building:year, dateEurope has tens of thousands of castles, forts and palaces, from Roman forts to 18th-century residences. This map shows the ones mapped in OpenStreetMap, one country at a time, so you can see where they cluster and which eras survive.
It depends on what you count: ruins, forts, palaces and manor houses all blur into "castle". Commonly cited estimates put Germany alone at around 20,000–25,000, and Europe as a whole in the tens of thousands. This map does not count all of Europe at once: pick a country and Loaded shows how many objects tagged historic=castle, historic=fort or historic=fortress OpenStreetMap has in that country's bounding box, so the numbers on the country buttons are only rough estimates.
Germany and France have the most castles in raw numbers, with the United Kingdom, Italy and Spain also high. Wales is often said to have more castles per square mile than any other country in Europe. The Rhine and Loire valleys, the Scottish Highlands and Transylvania are famous castle regions. Load a country and switch on the heat map: the brightest areas show where its castles concentrate.
All castle data comes from OpenStreetMap via the public Overpass API. Countries are queried for nodes and ways tagged historic=castle, historic=fort or historic=fortress (and relations tagged historic=castle) inside the country's rectangular bounding box. That query is run in advance and saved as a small file per country on this site, so most countries open in a moment; the date of the saved copy is shown in the panel. If a saved copy is missing, or when you press Refresh live, your browser sends the same query to the Overpass API itself (overpass-api.de first, then two mirrors, 60 seconds each). Because the box is a rectangle, castles just across a border can appear too.
The map reads the start_date, year_of_construction, building:year or date tag from OSM and takes the first 3- or 4-digit year it finds. That year sets the era colour: Roman before 500, Early Medieval 500–1000, High Medieval 1000–1300, Late Medieval 1300–1500, Renaissance 1500–1700 and Modern from 1700. Without a date tag the castle is grey and filed under Unknown; many castles have no date in OSM, so the Era filters only show the dated part.
Yes. Press F or use the full-screen button on the map. The map fills your whole screen and the panel, filters and castle card float on top of it. Press Esc or the button again to leave. On browsers that don't allow the Fullscreen API (such as iPhone Safari) the map fills the whole browser window instead.
Yes. OpenStreetMap is open for anyone to edit. If a castle is missing, in the wrong place or has incorrect tags, fix it at openstreetmap.org; the OSM link on each castle's card takes you straight to it. The Overpass API usually picks up edits within minutes, so load the country again to see the change.
There is no account and nothing is stored except your map-style choice in this browser. To work, the page does contact a few public services: the Overpass API (or a mirror) for the castle data of the country you pick, Esri's servers for the map tiles, unpkg.com for the Leaflet map library (and the heat-map plugin when you switch the heat map on), the Wikipedia summary API when you open a castle that has a Wikipedia article, and cookieless Simple Analytics for a page-view count. Your filters and searches are not sent anywhere. Wikidata, Google Maps and OSM are only contacted when you click one of their links.