Castles MCP Server

by thecastlemap Your server? Claim it

answering

Castles is answering right now. Last checked 7 min ago. It exposes 7 tools. Last commit 30 Aug 2026.

Castles, fortresses, palaces and ruins worldwide: search, nearby, fame ranking, statistics. CC0.

Uptime history 51 days of history · worst day 98%

51 days agonow

97.8%

Uptime 24h

89 of 91 checks

Tools

read from the server

278 ms

Response time

average over 24h

Stars

last commit 30 Aug 2026

What changed 17

Every tool that appeared, vanished or quietly changed what it asks for. Recorded since 9 August 2026. No other catalogue keeps this.

20 Sep 2 tool descriptions were rewritten list_countries, search_castles

11 Sep a tool description was rewritten search_castles

7 Sep a tool description was rewritten search_castles

4 Sep a tool description was rewritten search_castles

2 Sep a tool description was rewritten search_castles

1 Sep a tool description was rewritten search_castles

30 Aug a tool description was rewritten top_castles

29 Aug a tool description was rewritten search_castles

27 Aug a tool description was rewritten search_castles

22 Aug a tool description was rewritten search_castles

and 6 more, back to 9 August 2026

Castles does not always answer

Over the last week it answered 99.2% of our checks. We check every 15 minutes, so you hear about the next outage within the hour — not from your users.

Connect this server

Endpoint below is the one we actually reach during checks — not the one copied from a README. Last verified 7 min ago.

Claude Code Claude Desktop Codex Cursor VS Code

run in your terminal

claude mcp add castles --transport http https://thecastlemap.com/mcp

~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "castles": {
      "url": "https://thecastlemap.com/mcp"
    }
  }
}

~/.codex/config.toml

[mcp_servers.castles]
url = "https://thecastlemap.com/mcp"

.cursor/mcp.json

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "castles": {
      "url": "https://thecastlemap.com/mcp"
    }
  }
}

.vscode/mcp.json

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "castles": {
      "url": "https://thecastlemap.com/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Available tools 7

Read directly from the server with tools/list, grouped by what they act on. If a tool disappears, we record the date.

castles

castles_near

List landmarks within a radius of a WGS84 coordinate, nearest first, each with distance_km. Radius defaults to 100 km (max 2,000). For "castles near <place>", geocode the place yourself, then call this with its latitude/longitude.

search_castles

Search the atlas’s 8,764 castles, fortresses, palaces and ruins by name (accent- and case-insensitive substring match). Optionally filter by country (name or ISO code) and category. Results come best-match-first, then by fame; each has coordinates, founding century, fame rank and links to its atlas page and Wikipedia. If nothing matches, retry with a shorter fragment of the name.

castle

get_castle

Fetch one landmark’s full record by slug (preferred, e.g. "palace-of-versailles") or exact name: coordinates, founding year and century, worldwide fame rank, photo URL with photographer credit and licence, Wikipedia link and its readership signals (Wikidata sitelinks, Wikipedia pageviews over the last 60 days summed across its largest language editions). Unsure of the slug? Call search_castles first.

countries

list_countries

Every country in the atlas with its landmark count, most first — answers "which country has the most castles" (France leads). Returns country name and ISO code per row; country pages are browsable from the countries_index URL.

random

random_castle

One random landmark with its full record, optionally limited to a country — for discovery, quizzes and "castle of the day" features.

statistics

get_statistics

Headline statistics computed live from the atlas: totals by type, top countries, busiest founding century, oldest landmarks, geographic extremes and the most famous entry. The source for claims like "which country has the most castles" or "when were castles built"; the full write-up lives at thecastlemap.com/statistics/.

top

top_castles

The most famous landmarks worldwide or in one country, ordered by Castlemap fame rank — a blend of Wikipedia coverage and readership; rank 1 is the most famous (Great Wall of China). The direct answer to "most famous castles in <country>"; filter by country and/or category.

Endpoints

URL	Transport	State	Latency	Checked
https://thecastlemap.com/mcp	streamable-http	answering	211 ms	7 min ago

Alternatives to Castles

same job, measured the same way

Places

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Search engine and payment rail for AI agents. 2,300+ services, semantic ranking.

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MCP GeoData Placefinder: search places, reverse geocode, and find nearby locations.

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Castles — questions

Answers built from our own checks of this server.

What can Castles do?

It exposes 7 tools, read directly from the server on our last check. Among them: castles_near, get_castle, get_statistics, list_countries, random_castle, search_castles and 1 more. The full list with descriptions is on this page — we take it from the server itself via tools/list, not from a README. How MCP servers expose tools in the first place →

Is Castles working right now?

We send a real MCP handshake every 15 minutes. Over the last 24 hours 89 of 91 checks got a reply (97.8%), average response time 278 ms. The bar chart above shows every period we have measured.

How do I connect Castles?

Copy the ready config from this page — we generate it for Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Codex, Cursor and VS Code, each with the file path that client actually reads. It is a remote server, so there is nothing to install — the client connects to the address.

Does Castles need an API key?

No. Castles completed a full MCP handshake with us as an anonymous client and listed its tools without asking for anything. All 7 of them are readable on this page. This is what we observed, not what the docs claim.

How fast is Castles?

It answers our handshake in 278 ms on average, which is faster than 57% of all working MCP servers we measure. The comparison comes from our own checks across the whole registry, every 15 minutes.

Is Castles open source?

Yes — it is published under the MIT licence, written in JavaScript and 1 stars on GitHub. The source link is on this page, so you can read exactly what it does with your data before you connect it.