The best-known castles and palaces in North Rhine-Westphalia
Ordered by how much has been written about each place. The numbers match the map.
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The Münsterland castles are the obvious draw: Schloss Nordkirchen 6 km from Selm, Burg Vischering (1521) 1 km from Lüdinghausen, Schloss Lembeck (1692) 9 km from Dorsten. Along the Rhine: Schloss Benrath 4 km from Hilden, Schloß Drachenburg and the Burgruine Drachenfels 1 to 2 km from Königswinter. Schloss Burg is 4 km from Wermelskirchen.
RLQuest knows 614 castles and palaces in North Rhine-Westphalia, 476 with a Wikipedia article, more than three in four. The state is also covered for 653 viewpoints, 161 windmills, 152 ruins, 99 observation towers, 81 caves and 20 megalithic tombs. RLQuest sets a few of these as quests each day and checks them from your route; the map fills in a tile at a time.
Every dot is a place. The numbers mark the highlights listed below.
Ordered by how much has been written about each place. The numbers match the map.
A selection, best known first, with the nearest larger town next to each.
and 562 more
RLQuest knows these places too. Which means:
Some of your daily quests lead to a real place near you. The app uses your location to check you were really there.
If you're the first person in RLQuest to complete a quest at a place, it's your first find. The Place Book shows you which kinds of place you're still missing.
Every walk uncovers tiles, each about 350 m across. Over time you can see which corners you know well, and where you've never set foot.
Place data © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database License. Borders: geoBoundaries (CC BY 4.0); Canada: Statistics Canada. As of 2026-10-02. The list shows the places RLQuest knows and isn't complete. Photos come from Wikimedia Commons; author and license are credited on each photo.
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