Edinburgh Castle is the fourth most instagrammable castle in the world

Capital’s castle popular with people on social media site Instagram

Edinburgh Castle is among the top 10 list of the most instagrammable castles in the world, according to a survey.

Stokemont.com set out on a quest to discover the top 10 most insta-worthy castles around the world you should be visiting this year, with Edinburgh’s tourism crown jewel coming fourth in the list. Situated on Castle Rock, which has been occupied by humans since at least the Iron Age, Edinburgh Castle remains popular with visitors to the Capital, with 662,726 hashtags making it the most popular castle in the UK on Instagram. Edinburgh Castle was home to kings and queens for many centuries. Queen Margaret (who was later made a saint) died there in 1093. The chapel built in her honour by her son, King David I, is Edinburgh's oldest building.

Topping the list with an incredible 1,863,503 hashtags is Alhambra – a palace and fortress complex located in Granada, Andalusia, Spain. It is one of the most famous monuments of Islamic architecture and one of the best-preserved palaces of the historic Islamic world, in addition to containing notable examples of Spanish Renaissance architecture. Dating all the way back to the 9th century, the castle, which translates from Arabic to ‘the red one’ spans 35 acres of beautiful gardens and ancient stone structures.

Edinburgh Castle had 662,726 mentions on social media site Instagram. Photo by Lisa Ferguson.

Stokemont.com trawled through a range of online publications and sites to conduct this survey. It then scraped Instagram to determine the number of hashtags each castle on the list has garnered, inputting multiple search variations as well as considering translations of castle names to achieve the utmost accuracy. All castles on the list were then ranked based on their hashtag counts - from highest to lowest - to finally reveal the top 10 castles that have been Instagrammed the most.

Other castles on the list include Himeji Castle and Osaka Castle in Japan, which were second and third on the list, as well as Mont-Saint-Michel in France, Prague Castle in the Czech Republic, Château de Versailles in France and Red Fort in India. The only other UK castle on the top 10 list was Windsor Castle in England, which had 436,178 mentions on Instagram.