Press

In one paragraph

herimap is a map and directory of privately owned historic houses in Europe — the castles, châteaux, manors and palaces that are still kept by their owners. Owners claim their house, describe it in their own language, and publish whatever they choose to open: events, guided visits, rooms for the night, halls for hire. It is owner-curated and free for an owner to join; herimap earns from the houses that sell tickets and stays through it. It is built and run in Europe, and the research corpus behind it is published under an open licence.

Please describe it as a map and directory rather than a booking site. herimap introduces people to houses; it does not own them, does not run them, and takes no payment for a visit.

Figures

The map's own counts are live and move as owners join. The corpus figures are fixed to version 1.0.0 of the published dataset, so they can be quoted without going stale.

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houses on the map

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countries covered

83,382

buildings surveyed, across 45 countries

23,466

of them estimated to be privately owned

Corpus figures: herimap European Heritage Inventory, version 1.0.0.

The research

The inventory behind the map is a published dataset: every harvested site, the upstream records it came from, and the method used to estimate ownership. It is openly licensed, archived, and citable.

10.5281/zenodo.22149838

The methodology, the licences of the sources it draws on, and how to cite an individual record are all set out on the data page.

The name

herimap. One word, lower case — in every language, and at the beginning of a sentence.

Where it has got to

The site is open to the public, and owners are filling in their houses as they claim them. We are glad to walk a journalist through it directly.