Bad title for an interesting article. Most of the world lives rent free for the same reason: they own it.

Agree. Strange choice for a headline that comes across as quite western slanted. To whom would they pay rent exactly - long dead kings and princes? When the families have been living there continuously for 700 years, who's the landlord?

Historically, people who lived in castles were the landlords. Though we just called them lords for short.

Well, not all of them. Most of the inhabitants of a castle are still servants, after all.

Do they own it?

It sounded to me like they could live there if they were family of the original inhabitants but not sell that right to outsiders?

Like it's held in some kind of trust for them.

Though it's not spelled out exactly in the article either way.

Based on my experience with trying to buy hunting land, setting up a trust and leaving your property to the trust is a great way to stop your kids from "selling the family farm" after you kick it because there seems to always be one guy in every trust that wants a bigger percentage of the sell than everyone else which quickly turns into a real life example of the prisoners dilemma.

Castle estates are probably a few generations deeper than US land trusts which would make the problem much worse to deal with.

Most of the world! Never really thought about that. Here's some data: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_home_ow...

The world seems to be trending towards renting though.