Our mission

What is missing

Public monuments are catalogued, photographed and signposted. The private house a few fields away is often on no list a traveller would think to consult. It is not that nobody is interested. There is simply nowhere the interest can land.

A study commissioned by the European Commission identified the absence of comprehensive data on privately held heritage as an obstacle to looking after it. We began by measuring that absence across the continent, and then by filling it in.

What we are building

One map of the privately owned castles, châteaux, manors and palaces of Europe. Every house a click away, read in six interface languages and written in thirty-four.

Around it, whatever an owner chooses to open: a concert, a garden day, a room for the night, a guided visit, a hall for a celebration. And a way for a traveller to plan a route that passes them.

What we hold ourselves to

Four commitments, in the order they get tested.

• Owner-curated

  The words and the photographs on a house page belong to the person who keeps the house. We do not write an entry for them, and we do not overrule it.

• Free to be found

  Being on the map costs a house nothing — every house is listed and searchable whether or not its owner ever pays us. Houses on a paid tier are given more prominence for it.

• Open sources, credited

  Where a record began in a public database we say so, link back to it, and keep its licence attached — down to the individual export.

• European by construction

  Six languages from the first day rather than English with translations bolted on afterwards, and data that stays inside the European Union.

Where this has got to

The map is open to the public, and any owner can claim their house on it directly. The corpus of buildings behind it is already published as an openly licensed dataset for anyone who wants to check our work.