robots.txt
User-agent: *
# atlas-analytics beacon — no content, and crawlers that render the page were
# spending real crawl budget on it. Keeps the budget on castle pages.
# Listed BEFORE "Allow: /" on purpose: Google resolves by longest match, but
# simpler crawlers take the first matching line, and those are most of the
# beacon traffic. This order blocks it under both readings.
Disallow: /_a/
Disallow: /_a.js
# The map's deep link. Every castle page links its own `/?castle=<slug>` (the
# "view on the map" button, also the TouristAttraction's hasMap), which is
# 9,079 x 8 editions = ~72,632 crawlable URLs that all serve the same
# 8 homepages. Each carries a canonical back to its homepage, so nothing was ever
# indexed twice — but Google had fetched 1,627 of them by 2026-08-21 while
# 23,986 real pages sat in "Discovered, currently not indexed". The budget
# belongs to those. The link keeps working for people; crawlers skip it.
Disallow: /*?castle=
Allow: /
Sitemap: https://thecastlemap.com/sitemap.xml
llms.txt
# Castle Map
> The world's great castles, fortresses, palaces and ruins on one interactive map —
> 9,079 landmarks across 155 countries. Every one has a photo, coordinates and
> a link to its Wikipedia article (English where it exists; the atlas also
> reads 26 other Wikipedia language editions). 7,435 of them carry a founding
> year, the other 1,644 are undated. 9,063 open with a summary from Wikipedia;
> the rest with a description built from the data. Where the only article is in
> another language, the summary is machine-translated into English and says so.
Every landmark has a static, citable page at /castles/<slug>/ with a facts
table and schema.org JSON-LD (TouristAttraction + LandmarksOrHistoricalBuildings).
Country pages at /countries/<slug>/ list every landmark in that country.
City pages at /castles/near/<city>/ list every landmark within 100 km of a
city centre with straight-line distance and compass direction — 406 cities.
The tree is mirrored in seven more languages under a path prefix: Japanese
/ja/, German /de/, Spanish /es/, French /fr/, Polish /pl/, Dutch /nl/ and
Ukrainian /uk/. Every castle, country, city, ranking and section page exists in
all seven, with the landmark name and story taken from that language’s own
Wikipedia where an article exists. Three things are English-only: the castle
routes under /castles/routes/, /privacy/ and /embed/; and the localized
/changelog/ pages carry the English entries.
- [Interactive map](https://thecastlemap.com/)
- [CastleGuessr — free castle game: pin the castle on the world map, scored by distance](https://thecastlemap.com/guess/)
- [All 9,079 castles](https://thecastlemap.com/castles/)
- [Castles by country](https://thecastlemap.com/countries/)
- [Castles near you — day-trip guides for 406 cities, every castle within 100 km](https://thecastlemap.com/castles/near/)
- [All rankings in one place — fame & age; world, country, category](https://thecastlemap.com/castles/rankings/)
- [Most famous castles in the world — all 9,079 ranked](https://thecastlemap.com/castles/ranked/)
- [The most famous castle in every country — one per country, ranked](https://thecastlemap.com/castles/most-famous-by-country/)
- [Oldest castles in the world — every dated landmark ranked by founding year](https://thecastlemap.com/castles/oldest/)
- [The oldest castle in every country — one national champion per country](https://thecastlemap.com/castles/oldest-by-country/)
- [Medieval castles of the world — every landmark founded in the Middle Ages, c. 500–1500](https://thecastlemap.com/castles/medieval/)
- [Castles by region — the Loire Valley, the Middle Rhine, Andalusia, Transylvania, Kansai and more](https://thecastlemap.com/castles/regions/)
- [How many castles are there? — per country: what this atlas maps, what Wikidata holds, what published sources say](https://thecastlemap.com/castles/how-many/)
- [Castle statistics — which country has the most, per-capita leaders, founding centuries](https://thecastlemap.com/statistics/)
- [Free dataset — GeoJSON & CSV, CC0](https://thecastlemap.com/data/)
- [About — how the atlas is made](https://thecastlemap.com/about/)
- [Changelog — what's new on the atlas](https://thecastlemap.com/changelog/) (Atom feed: /changelog/feed.xml)
- [Full landmark index — one line per castle, plain text](https://thecastlemap.com/llms-full.txt)
- [Sitemap](https://thecastlemap.com/sitemap.xml)
Language editions: [Deutsch](https://thecastlemap.com/de/) · [Español](https://thecastlemap.com/es/) · [Français](https://thecastlemap.com/fr/) · [日本語](https://thecastlemap.com/ja/) · [Nederlands](https://thecastlemap.com/nl/) · [Polski](https://thecastlemap.com/pl/) · [Українська](https://thecastlemap.com/uk/)
MCP server: query the dataset live at https://thecastlemap.com/mcp
(Model Context Protocol, streamable HTTP, no auth, read-only — tools:
search_castles, get_castle, castles_near, top_castles, list_countries,
get_statistics, random_castle).
Data: Wikidata (CC0). Photos: Wikimedia Commons (see each page for credit).
Basemap: OpenFreeMap / OpenStreetMap contributors + Natural Earth.
