Flightmussy/castlemap-mcp
📇 ☁️ 🏠 - Query 2,400 castles, fortresses and palaces across 131 countries (coordinates, founding dates, fame ranking, Wikipedia summaries) from the open CC0 Castlemap dataset built on Wikidata. Hosted endpoint needs no API key; the zero-dependency server can also be self-hosted.
Quick Install
{
"mcpServers": {
"flightmussy-castlemap-mcp": {
"command": "npx",
"args": [
"-y",
"flightmussy-castlemap-mcp"
]
}
}
}Using an AI coding agent (Claude Code, Cursor, etc.)? Copy a ready-made prompt that tells it to fetch the setup instructions and install this server for you.
Documentation Overview
Castlemap MCP server
A Model Context Protocol server for the Castlemap atlas: 2,400 castles, fortresses and palaces across 131 countries, with coordinates, founding dates, categories, fame ranking and Wikipedia summaries.
It is already running. Point a client at the hosted endpoint — there is no install, no signup and no API key:
https://thecastlemap.com/mcp
Streamable HTTP, stateless, POST-only (a GET returning 405 is correct).
Protocol revisions 2025-06-18 and 2025-03-26 are accepted.
Client configuration
{
"mcpServers": {
"castles": {
"type": "http",
"url": "https://thecastlemap.com/mcp"
}
}
}
Registry entry: com.thecastlemap/castles.
Tools
| Tool | What it does |
|---|---|
search_castles | Find castles by name, country or category |
get_castle | Full record for one castle |
castles_near | Nearest castles to a coordinate (haversine); geocode first |
top_castles | Best-known castles, by fame rank |
list_countries | The 131 countries, with counts |
get_statistics | Live aggregates — totals, per-country, per-century |
random_castle | One castle at random |
Data
Derived from Wikidata, with summaries from Wikipedia and images from Wikimedia Commons. The atlas is curated rather than exhaustive: it covers castles with a documented history, a real photo and exact coordinates, not every earthwork and ruin.
The factual records are released as CC0 and downloadable as GeoJSON and CSV
from thecastlemap.com/data — also mirrored on
GitHub,
Hugging Face,
Kaggle
and Zenodo (DOI
10.5281/zenodo.21322360).
Running it yourself
server.mjs has zero dependencies — no SDK, no node_modules. It needs
Node 18+ and a castles.geojson to read (download one from
/data):
CASTLES_GEOJSON=/path/to/castles.geojson PORT=8891 node server.mjs
It binds 127.0.0.1:8891 by default; HOST, PORT and CASTLES_GEOJSON
override that. The file is re-read when its mtime changes (throttled to 60s), so
updating the data needs no restart.
castlemap-mcp.service is the systemd unit used in production — loopback-bound,
DynamicUser, ProtectSystem=strict, with nginx terminating TLS in front. Set
ExecStart to your own node path and ReadOnlyPaths/CASTLES_GEOJSON to
wherever the data lives.
Provenance
Built by Alban Zaja with AI assistance: the concept, direction and review are mine; much of the implementation was written with Claude. The underlying data is not generated — it comes from Wikidata, and every record is traceable to its Wikidata item.
License
Code: MIT (see LICENSE). Data: CC0. Wikipedia summary text remains CC BY-SA
and is attributed per record.