For Halloween this year I wanted to create a spooky, atmospheric map. I settled on mapping the castles of Europe including Bran Castle. I know that Bran Castle doesn’t actually have any historical links to Bram Stoker but I thought it would be nice to include given it’s reputation. I came across a great website called https://download.osmdata.xyz/. It allowed me to easily download a geopackage of all the historic tags from OSM.

Now the the elephant in the room — the actual castle data. I filtered the data by historic=castle. I has tried filtering it by categories such as castle_type but there just wasn’t enough tagged to make a nice map. People commenting on Reddit have been at pains to point out how inaccurate the map is and by and large they are correct. It’s the best that could be make with the data available and I usually wouldn’t publish something where I know the data wasn’t up to scratch however as this was only meant to be a fun Halloween map I thought an exception could be made!

Anyway, I hope you enjoy it (above data caveat aside) as much as I enjoyed making it. Happy Halloween!