Maybe Britain has a lot of moldering castles that are in fact wizarding schools housing 400 students. But what about other countries? Where could they hide them? My WAGs:
somewhere in the Himalayas, protected by yetis.
somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, guarded by bigfoot.
in the Amazon basin watched over by 90-foot sucurujis (giant anacondas)
undergound in a permafrost region either in the Northern Canadian territory or Siberia.
the school beside Loch Ness has relocated, when the monster developed a too strong taste for publicity.
Well, there are American wizards, but we don’t know much about them. I’d bet that there are schools associated with the traditional big cities in the British Colonies (Boston, Philadelphia, New York, and maybe one in the South, near Richmond or Charleston). Beyond that, it would seem that there’d need to be one in the West, maybe under a mountain.
I believe the North American version of Azkhaban would be on Isle Royale in Lake Superior. This would explain why it is a national park and a wilderness area.
I’ve found one – go to Google Maps and search for “Magic School, Madison, KS, United States”. You find a very suspicious-looking empty patch of ground at the intersection of two roads. The school must be hidden from aerial photography, but somehow Google knows that it’s there.
We’d be famous for our imbedded cliff schools. One in The Palisades on the east coast, one in the steepest part of The Grand Canyon in the middle of the country.
There must be something about American wizards: UFOs, bigfoot, tornados and hurricanes, weird cults and exclusive enclaves. Wizards in other countries seem to like old ruins, hauntings, volcanoes, mean wildlife.
In Paris and Rome, the answer’s easy: the catacombs (daylighted here and there by a very old church or castle.)
In Japan, those 1,000 year old Shinto temples that get refurbished every 20 years or so: must coincide with the appointment of a new headmaster.
Oh, that’s interesting. I was thinking that British colonial wizards, who would have likely been fleeing the Puritans in England and would have started a school around the time that Harvard, William and Mary, Yale, Princeton, and all the other Colonial Colleges were founded. I could absolutely see French wizards founding a school in the bayou near New Orleans.