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.
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