Fairytale Castles Around the World

Castles that look drawn for a storybook: pointed turrets, island settings, painted walls and silhouettes framed by forest, lake or mountain. The test for a place here is the view itself. Each one is a castle or palace built to be visited and admired, whose outline reads like a fairytale illustration, whether it is a genuine medieval fortress or a nineteenth-century romantic fantasy built to look like one. Battle-scarred ruins and cliff monasteries are left out, and the one castle that travel advice currently puts out of reach, in Crimea, says so in its caption. The captions name the country and era and explain what gives each castle its storybook look, from a legend or a royal dreamer to a restoration that added the towers. The gallery runs roughly west to east, from New York's Thousand Islands across Europe to Japan.