Castles were never just picturesque; they were engineered to survive sieges, and some fell anyway, through tricks rather than force. Palaces told a different kind of story, built to awe rather than defend, from a hunting lodge that swallowed the French court to a fortress-turned-museum in Beijing. Between the two sit the legends: ravens that supposedly guard an empire, a slipper that was never mistranslated, and a robber baron undone at the worst possible moment.
Every tile in a Castles and Palaces game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Castles
nine stories
1The world's largest occupied castle
On the tile: Windsor Castle1070s
William the Conqueror raised a wooden fort on a chalk bluff above the Thames in the 1070s, one of a ring of motte-and-bailey castles set roughly a day's march apart around London. Two more baileys went up before the century ended, east and west of the keep, fixing the basic shape the castle still has. Stone slowly replaced timber, and monarchs have lived here for nearly a thousand years, through a bad fire in 1992 and the long restoration after it. The Royal Household calls it simply the largest occupied castle in the world.
The Teutonic Knights began building in red brick in 1274 and kept at it for well over a century, adding wings, courtyards and a chapter house where the order met to decide its business, as their crusading state spread across the Baltic coast. The finished complex covers roughly 52 acres, made almost entirely from locally fired brick of a distinctive red hue. Guinness World Records recognizes it as the largest brick castle in the world, a title that turns on that one material rather than raw square footage.
Prague Castle began in the 880s, when Prince Borivoj, the first Premyslid in the written record, moved his seat to a hill above the Vltava where a Slavic settlement already stood. Centuries of rebuilding turned it into an irregular walled complex stretching some 570 meters end to end, home to churches and palaces rather than a single keep. Guinness World Records lists it as the largest ancient castle in the world, a record that rests on sprawl rather than on any one building.
On July 3, 1945, American bombers dropped 767 tons of incendiaries on Himeji and burned out nearly two thirds of the built-up city. The castle came through blackened by smoke from the fires but with little damage. Its own history page adds one detail, filed under local stories rather than record: a stray firebomb landed in the castle and never went off. In December 1993 the castle joined Horyu-ji in Nara as one of Japan's first World Heritage Sites.
Ludwig II of Bavaria laid the foundation stone in September 1869 for a private retreat built around the operas of Richard Wagner, with turrets, a throne room and an artificial grotto. Workers were still finishing rooms when he moved into the unfinished palace in 1884, and he lived there a total of 172 days. In June 1886 his government declared him insane and deposed him; he was taken to Berg Palace and found dead the next day in the shallow water of Lake Starnberg. Within six weeks the palace was opened to paying visitors.
Raymond II of Tripoli handed this Syrian hilltop fortress to the Knights Hospitaller in the early 1140s, and they spent over a century turning it into a masterpiece of concentric defense, an inner castle ringed by an outer wall, holding some 2,000 people at its peak. Saladin brought an army to it in 1188 and moved on without taking it. Baibars broke in during the spring of 1271, collapsing a corner tower by mining, but the last defenders held the inner castle until a forged surrender order arrived. Whose signature it carried, the accounts disagree.
Edinburgh Castle sits on Castle Rock, the hard dolerite core of a volcano that cooled about 340 million years ago, long before there was a Scotland to defend. Ice age glaciers scraped the softer sedimentary rock off every side but the east, where what survived slopes gently away as the Royal Mile. People fortified the summit as far back as the Iron Age, and David I was building on it in the twelfth century. It is still the most visited paid attraction in Scotland, with just over two million visitors in 2025.
Richard the Lionheart put Chateau Gaillard up on a cliff above the Seine in two years, from 1196 to 1198, to hold Normandy against the French crown. Philip II still needed a siege of months. With the outer bailey taken, he sent a party to hunt for a weak point, and it found one: a garderobe shaft, the outlet of the latrines, opening into the chapel. The men climbed it, set the chapel door alight, and in the confusion lowered the movable bridge. The garrison held the keep until March 6, 1204.
Edward I began Caernarfon Castle in 1283 after conquering Wales, and had his masons face it in multicolored masonry and shape the towers as polygons rather than the usual rounds. Cadw says the design echoed imperial Roman architecture, and the walls of Constantinople in particular, staking a claim to empire in the middle of Wales. The project, town walls and quay included, took 47 years and cost about 25,000 pounds. Twice since, in 1911 and again in 1969, the castle has been used to invest a Prince of Wales.
Versailles started small: a hunting lodge Louis XIII built outside Paris in 1623 and first used in June 1624. His son Louis XIV turned it into the seat of French government, expanding it for decades into a palace built to overwhelm, crowned by the Hall of Mirrors, where seventeen mirrored arches face seventeen windows down a 73-meter gallery. Ambassadors from Siam in 1686 and Persia in 1715 crossed it to reach the king. From 1682 Versailles was the main residence of the French court and government, a lodge grown into the address of a kingdom.
Emperor Yongle ordered the Forbidden City built after moving the Ming capital to Beijing, and construction ran from 1406 to 1420, employing a million laborers and 100,000 artisans. The result is the world's largest palace complex, its halls, gates and courtyards aligned north to south and mirrored left and right. Fourteen Ming emperors and ten Qing emperors ruled China from behind its walls over the five centuries that followed. Most of the emperor's subjects were never allowed inside, which is how the palace earned the English name it carries today.
3A Renaissance palace that stood roofless for centuries
On the tile: Alhambra1527-1967
Charles V arrived in Granada in June 1526 with his wife, Isabel of Portugal, stayed in the Alhambra and came away impressed enough to order a palace of his own inside the Moorish complex. Construction started in 1527: a circular courtyard hidden inside a square building, a plan with no precedent in Renaissance architecture. Work dragged on for over a century and was abandoned in 1637 with the roof unbuilt, leaving the palace open to the sky. Restoration began in 1923, and the roof was finished only in 1967.
Sultan Mehmed II, fresh from the conquest of Constantinople, had Topkapi Palace built between 1460 and 1478 as the new seat of Ottoman power. Its four walled courtyards grew more restricted the deeper a visitor went, from the public outer court to private chambers reserved for the sultan's household. Sultans governed the empire from inside those walls for nearly four centuries, until Abdulmecid I, the thirty-first sultan, moved to the new Dolmabahce Palace in 1856. Topkapi opened as a museum on April 3, 1924, the first of the Turkish Republic.
5Fountains that have run without pumps for 300 years
On the tile: Peterhof1717-1723
Peter the Great had already broken ground at Peterhof when he toured Versailles in 1717 and came away determined to beat its fountains. Versailles raised its water with a huge pumping machine at Marly; Peter used the landscape instead. His engineer Vasily Tuvolkov tapped springs on the Ropsha Heights, about 12 miles inland, and ran a conduit downhill to the gardens, where the drop toward the Gulf of Finland drove every jet. The fountains were inaugurated in 1723 and have run for three centuries since without a single pump.
A Tibetan king raised a palace on Lhasa's Red Hill in the 7th century. A thousand years later the Fifth Dalai Lama began again on the same site, and the White Palace went up between 1645 and 1648. The ceremonial Red Palace came later, finished in 1694 by his regent, twelve years after the Dalai Lama had died. The complex climbs thirteen stories up the mountainside at an altitude of about 3,700 meters and holds more than a thousand rooms of chapels, offices and living quarters. It was the Dalai Lamas' winter residence until 1959.
Architect Nicolai Eigtved designed Amalienborg in the 1750s as four matching mansions for four noblemen, set around an octagonal square with an equestrian statue of King Frederick V at its center. None of it was meant for royalty. That changed in 1794, when fire destroyed the royal family's home at Christiansborg Palace; within days the king had bought two of the mansions and moved in. Denmark's royal family lives on that square still, in buildings that now carry the names of kings rather than the noblemen who built them.
King Ferdinand II of Portugal bought a ruined monastery on a mountaintop above Sintra in 1838 and hired Wilhelm von Eschwege, a German mining engineer with a taste for architecture, to build over it. What went up was deliberately eclectic, mixing neo-Gothic, neo-Manueline, neo-Islamic and neo-Renaissance styles into one fantastical whole, painted in reds and yellows that faded to gray before a late twentieth-century repainting restored them. Ferdinand also planted the surrounding park with tree species from every continent, making it the most important arboretum in Portugal.
Empress Maria Theresa rebuilt Schonbrunn in the mid-1700s as the Habsburg family's summer residence outside Vienna, a palace of 1,441 rooms. On October 13, 1762, a six-year-old Wolfgang Mozart and his ten-year-old sister Maria Anna played violin and keyboard for the imperial family in the Hall of Mirrors. Emperor Franz Stephan dared the boy to play with the keys covered; he did it, then performed a whole concerto by the court composer Wagenseil. Schonbrunn stayed an imperial residence until 1918, when the last Habsburg emperor signed away his role in its Blue Chinese Salon.
After landing in England in 1066, William the Conqueror's forces needed strongholds fast, and the motte-and-bailey design gave them one: pile earth into a mound, the motte, top it with a wooden tower, and enclose an adjoining yard, the bailey, with a timber fence. It needed little skilled labor and no stonemasons, so a castle could go up in a few weeks. Estimates of how many the Normans raised run from nearly 700 across England and Wales in William's own reign to as many as a thousand, turning hostile countryside into a network of garrisoned strongpoints.
Edward I began Beaumaris Castle on the Welsh island of Anglesey in 1295, and his engineers designed it as a textbook concentric fortress: a low outer wall studded with towers, a taller inner wall behind it, and a water-filled moat with its own tidal dock that small coastal vessels could sail into. Cadw, which cares for the site, describes the result as a fortress of immense size and near-perfect symmetry. It never got the chance to prove it: money ran out as trouble in Scotland drained the treasury, and the outer towers and main gates were never raised to their intended height.
An arrow loop looks like a simple slit from outside a castle wall, too narrow for an attacker's arrow to find the defender behind it. Step inside and the wall opens up. The stone behind the slit is cut away at an oblique angle into a recess called an embrasure, so an archer can stand close to the opening without being cramped and still swing his aim wide. A common variation crossed the vertical slit with a level horizontal one, a shape that suited longbow and crossbow alike and widened what a defender could see.
A portcullis was a heavy grille, usually of oak, plated and shod with iron, that dropped from the ceiling of a gatehouse and ran down grooves cut into the stone on either side of the passage. One portcullis slowed an attacker; the best-defended gatehouses used more. At Harlech Castle in north Wales, built for Edward I between 1282 and 1289, the passage between the two gate towers was guarded by three portcullises and at least two heavy doors. A force that forced the first gate could find the next one already down, sealed inside a stone tunnel with nowhere to go.
Sir Edward Dallingridge, a knight who had grown rich fighting in France, won royal permission in 1385 to turn his Sussex manor house into a castle, and built Bodiam: a broad moat, corner towers, battlements. For centuries it looked like a model medieval fortress. Then the historian Charles Coulson pointed out that its moat is easy to drain, its walls are thin, and its gunports sit where they could barely hit anything. Coulson argued Dallingridge built Bodiam to advertise wealth and standing rather than to hold off an army. Other scholars still read it as a real fortress, and the argument continues.
Edward I grew impatient during his 1304 siege of Stirling Castle and ordered his engineers to build one of the largest trebuchets ever made, nicknamed Warwolf. Five master carpenters and forty-nine laborers reportedly spent at least three months assembling it on site, and it threw stones of about 300 pounds. Sir William Oliphant, holding the castle with about twenty-five men, tried to surrender before the engine was finished. Edward refused, had a gallery built so the ladies of his court could watch, and took the surrender only after Warwolf had been tried on the walls.
In 1216, rebel barons invited Prince Louis of France to take the English crown, and his army swept across southern England, but Dover Castle refused to fall. Louis set his miners tunneling beneath the twin-towered gatehouse, and when one of its towers came down the French stormed the breach, only to find the garrison had thrown up a barrier of boulders, timber cross-beams and oak posts behind it. They were driven out with heavy losses. Afterward the damaged north gate was blocked solid, and Hubert de Burgh, the justiciar who had held the castle, added a new barbican.
Stone battlements gave castle defenders a line of alternating gaps and solid blocks to shelter behind and shoot through, but they left a blind spot directly below, at the base of the wall. Builders solved it with hoardings: temporary wooden galleries built out over the parapet, with holes cut in their floors so defenders could drop stones straight down onto anyone trying to climb or undermine the wall. Timber burns, so later castles replaced them with machicolations, the same overhanging gallery built permanently in stone, doing the job without the fire risk.
A popular castle tour story claims spiral staircases were built winding clockwise so a right-handed defender at the top could swing a sword freely while an attacker climbing from below had his blade pinned against the pillar. It is a good story with no medieval evidence behind it. Plenty of castle stairs turn the other way, and the White Tower at the Tower of London has both. Newcastle Castle traces the swordsman explanation to Theodore Andrea Cook, an enthusiast of art criticism and fencing, whose book on spirals came centuries after the stairs were cut.
1Dracula's castle has almost no real Dracula in it
On the tile: Bran CastleMyth busted
Bran Castle in Transylvania is marketed worldwide as Dracula's Castle, but the connection is thinner than the gift shops suggest. Bram Stoker never visited Romania, and by the castle's own account he took care not to tie his invented count to any real prince. Vlad the Impaler, the 15th-century ruler usually named as the model, probably never lived at Bran; accounts of his time there run from a night or two as a prisoner to two months. The fortress he really did rebuild and use stands in ruins at Poenari, far from the tour buses.
Guides at the Tower of London tell of Charles II being warned that if the ravens ever left, the Tower and the kingdom would fall, a prophecy said to be centuries old. Historians who went looking found nothing of the sort. The earliest known evidence of ravens kept at the Tower is an illustration from 1883, two centuries after Charles died, and the warning itself cannot be traced in print before July 1944, in the middle of the Second World War.
Henry VIII had his second wife, Anne Boleyn, beheaded on Tower Green in May 1536 and buried in the Tower's chapel of St Peter ad Vincula. Ever since, people have said her ghost glides across the grounds at the head of a silent procession, retracing that short walk to the chapel. The records show a quieter mystery: during restoration work in 1876, remains supposed to be hers were found in the chancel and reburied near the altar, beneath a memorial pavement inscribed with her name.
Camelot is missing from the oldest Arthurian material, where Arthur holds court at Caerleon or some other city. The name turns up first in the twelfth century, in Chretien de Troyes's French romance about Lancelot, and becomes Arthur's capital only later. Real places still claim it. The Tudor antiquary John Leland pointed at Cadbury Castle in Somerset, and excavations there in the 1960s found the Iron Age hillfort refortified in Arthur's supposed era and held by a powerful leader and his followers. Nothing dug up there names it Camelot.
The clifftop ruins at Tintagel in Cornwall owe their fame to one writer. In about 1138, Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain told how Arthur was conceived there, the earliest written mention of the place; why Geoffrey chose it can only be guessed. The castle tourists visit came almost a century later, after Richard, Earl of Cornwall, bought the island in May 1233, apparently keen to exploit a literary fame the site already had. Archaeologists have found people on that cliff trading with the Mediterranean centuries before Geoffrey wrote.
Spiked iron cabinets called iron maidens turn up in castle dungeon displays as instruments of medieval torture, and there is no evidence any existed before the 1800s. Some historians trace the tale to a German writer, Johann Philipp Siebenkees, whose account had one first used in August 1515 to execute a coin forger, and argue he made the history up. The cabinets themselves were often built to match, pieced together from Renaissance iron coffins and fitted with spikes for paying visitors. The objects are real. The medieval history attached to them is not.
Urquhart Castle's ruined towers sit on the shore of Loch Ness near Drumnadrochit, on the road where a couple driving in 1933 reported seeing a huge creature roll through the water, a sighting that a local newspaper turned into international news and the start of the modern Nessie craze. The road itself was new that year, finished along the shore and giving drivers a clear view of the loch. The most famous image, the 1934 Surgeon's Photograph, was exposed in 1994 as a hoax staged with a toy submarine fitted with a wooden head.
Predjama Castle is wedged into the mouth of a cave in a Slovenian cliff, which made it close to unattackable. Its most famous resident, the 15th-century robber baron Erazem, held out against an imperial army for over a year, using the tunnels behind the castle to bring in food and slip out on raids. The story goes that one of his own men signaled the besiegers at the one moment the walls could not protect his master: Erazem was in the privy, and a cannon shot ended the siege. The legend is popular and unfounded.
Chateau de Chambord's grand staircase is two spiral ramps wound around each other in a double helix, so a person climbing one side can glimpse someone descending the other through openings in the hollow core, though they never meet. Its design echoes sketches in Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks, and legend credits the aging Italian genius with it. Francis I did bring Leonardo to his court in 1516, and Leonardo died three years later, but the chateau's own account calls the identity of its architect an enigma: no plan, no contemporary text names who drew it.