Catalog
55 routes found
In April 1519 Cortés landed on the coast of Veracruz; in August 1521 the Aztec capital fell. In between came alliances, a massacre, a night of disaster on a causeway and an eight-month siege. The route follows the campaign from Villa Rica to Tlatelolco and sets the Spanish accounts of Cortés and Díaz beside Tlaxcalan and Aztec ones where they are known. Where the accounts conflict, the stop says so.
In August 1492 three small ships slipped down the Río Tinto from Palos with a plan to reach the Indies by sailing west. By mid-March 1493 Columbus was back in Palos without his flagship, which had been wrecked off Hispaniola, but with captives, samples of gold and plants unknown in Europe. The route follows the voyage in order: the friary where the plan found friends, a stopover in the Canaries, the first landfall in the Bahamas, the wrecked flagship and the fort of La Navidad, a storm-driven stop in Lisbon, the return to Palos and the report to the monarchs in Barcelona. The landfall island and the fort site are both debated, and the pins say so.
Contains difficult themes: the murder of a poet in the Spanish Civil War. Federico García Lorca was born in a farming village in the Granada vega and wrote his rural plays in the family's summer house on the city's edge. In August 1936, weeks into the Civil War, he was arrested in Granada and killed near Víznar. The route follows his life from the birthplace to the orchard house, then the last days in 1936 and the memorials in the hills. The exact place of his death and grave is still disputed, and the final stops are marked as approximate or speculative.
On 19 October 1812 the Grande Armée walked out of Moscow after five weeks of occupation. Six weeks later, what was left of it scrambled across the Berezina on two hastily built bridges. In between lay a blocked road, a burning town, a depleted depot, a blizzard and a river full of ice. The route follows six places on that march, from the mined Kremlin through Maloyaroslavets, Vyazma, Smolensk and Krasny to the crossing at Studienka. Most pins mark a town or village, not a battlefield.
Contains accounts of deaths in extreme cold. In January 1959 a group of ten experienced hikers from the Ural Polytechnical Institute set out on a ski trek into the northern Urals. Nine never came back: they cut their way out of their tent on a mountain slope one February night and died in the snow, and the cause is still discussed. This route follows the group from the institute in Sverdlovsk by train and lorry to the last village, then up to the mountain and the pass now named after them, and ends with the survivor's memorial. It sticks to the record; the explanations are left to the reader. The exact tent site is approximate.
On 12 April 1961 a pilot climbed into a small capsule on top of a rocket and became the first person in space. The flight lasted less than two hours; the road to it took a year of training, and the days after it turned a pilot into a worldwide celebrity. This route follows Yuri Gagarin from the training ground at Moscow's Khodynka Airfield to the launch pad at Baikonur, the field in the Saratov region where he came down, the Kremlin ceremony and the museum that keeps his capsule. The museum pin marks the Energia company site rather than the museum itself.
At 82, Leo Tolstoy slipped out of his house in the night, boarded a train with no destination in mind and was dead within ten days. The route follows that flight of November 1910, from his estate through two monasteries to a small railway station that suddenly drew the attention of the world. It covers six stops in the Tula, Kaluga and Lipetsk regions. Three stops are approximate: two railway stations pinned by map search, and Astapovo, pinned on its village.
A baker's oven in Pudding Lane, a gale from the east and a city of timber and pitch: in four days in September 1666 the fire destroyed medieval London, including Old St Paul's. Samuel Pepys watched it from the Tower, from the river and from a church tower, and wrote it all down. The route follows the fire from its first spark on Sunday morning to its end on Wednesday, then to the Monument and the Golden Boy that remember it. Where the sources give only an area, such as the refugee camps at Moorfields, the pin marks it loosely.
In the summer of 1588 a Spanish fleet appeared off Cornwall with a plan to join Parma's army. Beacons carried the news to London, the English fleet came out of Plymouth, and within weeks fireships, a day of heavy gunnery and autumn storms had ended the plan. The route follows the campaign through seven places, from the first sighting to a beach in County Sligo where three ships broke up. Most of the fighting was at sea, so the pins mark the nearest coast landmark, and the story of Drake and his game of bowls at Plymouth is labelled as legend.
For eighteen months in 1860 and 1861, relays of light riders on fast horses carried letters 1,900 miles from the Missouri River to California. It took about ten days, was never profitable, and was made obsolete by the telegraph within a year and a half — yet it became one of the great legends of the Old West. The route follows the mail west through eight places: the stables where the first rider set out, a surviving station in Kansas, Fort Kearny, Julesburg, the plains where Mark Twain saw a rider flash past his stagecoach, Utah, the Nevada desert and the terminus in Sacramento. Where legend (Buffalo Bill, Twain's eight days) outruns the record, the text says so.
In early 1965 Black residents of Selma, Alabama, backed by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and SNCC, pressed for the right to vote. After a state trooper shot Jimmie Lee Jackson in nearby Marion, activists called for a march to the state capital. Troopers stopped the first attempt on the Edmund Pettus Bridge on 7 March; the third march, under federal protection, reached Montgomery on 25 March. The route follows the marchers from Marion to Selma's Brown Chapel and the bridge, across Lowndes County's muddy campsites and the City of St. Jude to the steps of the Alabama State Capitol. The Voting Rights Act followed that summer. The farm campsites are not pinned exactly.
On the night of 14 April 1865 John Wilkes Booth shot President Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theatre in Washington and escaped on horseback. Lincoln died the next morning in a house across the street; Booth was hunted down twelve days later in a Virginia barn, in what was then the largest manhunt in US history. The route follows both threads in turn: the theater and the room where Lincoln died, then Booth's road south through the Navy Yard Bridge, a Maryland tavern, a doctor's farmhouse and a swamp, to the farm where it ended.
On the night of 18 April 1775 Paul Revere was rowed across the Charles River, got a horse in Charlestown and rode west to warn John Hancock and Samuel Adams that British troops were on the move. He left three accounts of that night, and this route follows them rather than the poem. It runs through nine places, from his house in North Square and the lanterns at Old North Church to the pasture in Lincoln where a British patrol stopped him, and on to Concord, which Samuel Prescott reached without him. Where a spot is only traditional, the stop says so.
Vlad III ruled Wallachia in three separate reigns and earned his nickname from impalement, his favorite method of execution. His patronymic, Dracula, is thought to have inspired the name of Bram Stoker's vampire, but the man himself spent his life between the Ottoman sultans and the king of Hungary. Nine places follow his life in order, from the Transylvanian house named as his birthplace to the battlefield near Snagov: hostage years, exile, raids, a war with the sultan and a long imprisonment. Bran Castle is left out on purpose, since it is often, but incorrectly, said to have been his home.
In AD 79 a mountain above the Bay of Naples blew apart. Pliny the Younger watched from Misenum across the water, lost his uncle, the admiral Pliny the Elder, to the eruption, and years later described it for the historian Tacitus in two letters: the only eyewitness account that survives. The route follows the eruption in the order of its events, from the mountain's first column to Pompeii, Herculaneum, the beach at Stabiae and back to Misenum. Pliny's letters never mention Pompeii or Herculaneum, so those stops come from archaeology. The traditional date is 24 August, but newer evidence points to the autumn.
Edward the Confessor died childless in January 1066, and by the end of the year the crown had passed through Harold Godwinson to William of Normandy. Between the two coronations lie three battles in three weeks, fought at opposite ends of England by a king who marched his army the length of the country twice. The route follows the crown from Westminster to the Yorkshire landing of Harald Hardrada, Fulford and Stamford Bridge, then to Pevensey, Hastings and the field at Battle, and back to Westminster on Christmas Day. The exact ground of several battles is debated, so those pins mark the best-known sites.
A peasant girl from a Meuse valley village persuades a doubting captain, then a doubting prince, to give her an army. Within weeks of reaching Orléans in 1429 she has lifted a siege, and by July she stands beside Charles at his coronation. Barely a year later she is a prisoner, and by May 1431 she is dead. The route follows her through nine places, from her family's house in Domrémy to the square in Rouen where she was burned. Where a building was rebuilt or the exact spot is unrecorded, the stop says so.
On 26 February 1815 Napoleon slipped away from Elba with some 1,000 men. Within a month he was back in the Tuileries, and by mid-July he had surrendered to the Royal Navy. The route follows him stop by stop: his villa on Elba, the landing at Golfe-Juan, the meeting at Laffrey and the entry into Grenoble on the Route Napoléon, the Tuileries, the farms of Hougoumont and La Haye Sainte at Waterloo, then Malmaison and Île d'Aix, where his journey ended. The pins at Golfe-Juan and Grenoble mark the towns, not exact spots.
Just after midnight on 6 June 1944, gliders landed beside a canal bridge at Bénouville, and by mid-morning Allied troops were ashore on five code-named beaches — Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword — along the Normandy coast. This route visits the places where that day was won and lost, and what stands there today. It starts with the glider coup de main at Pegasus Bridge, then runs along the coast from west to east: the museum built on the sand at Utah, the Rangers' climb at Pointe du Hoc, the American cemetery above Omaha, the concrete of the Mulberry harbour at Arromanches, the Canadian centre behind Juno and the Grand Bunker above Sword.
Belfast built her, Southampton sailed her, and two tender ports filled her up before the Atlantic took her. This route follows the whole last leg of Titanic's maiden voyage in order — from the Belfast slipway where 100,000 people watched her leave the ways to the Halifax cemetery where 121 of her dead are buried. Six stops: the shipyard that became a museum, the Southampton quayside and its memorial to the engineers who stayed at their posts, the two Channel ports where tenders ferried passengers out to a ship too big to come alongside, the wreck on the seabed at 12,500 feet, and the graves at Fairview Lawn. Only the wreck is out of reach; every other stop can be walked today.
In November 1095 Pope Urban II, answering a Byzantine emperor's plea for help against the Seljuk Turks, called western Christians to an armed pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Tens of thousands answered — knights, foot soldiers and poor pilgrims. Their armies took separate roads to Constantinople, then marched together across Anatolia and Syria. Almost four years after the call, they stormed Jerusalem and massacred much of its population. The route follows the main armies in order, from Clermont to Jerusalem, using the participants' own chronicles as summarised by modern historians. Violence against Jews in the Rhineland and against the people of the cities on the way is part of the story and is named plainly. There are no travel tips for Syria or the Lebanese border area.
On a Sunday evening in May 1857 Indian soldiers of the East India Company's army mutinied at Meerut and rode for Delhi. Within weeks much of northern India was in revolt — soldiers, princes dispossessed by the Company, and villagers with their own grievances. It took the British more than a year to crush it, and afterwards the Company itself was abolished and India placed under the Crown. The rebellion goes by many names, from the Sepoy Mutiny to the First War of Independence. It was not one army on one road but a chain of uprisings, and the route visits its main centres in order: Meerut, Delhi, Kanpur, Lucknow, Jhansi, Kalpi and Gwalior. Both sides committed atrocities against civilians, and the texts name them plainly.
In October 1934 the Chinese Communists' main army, beaten by Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists, broke out of its base in Jiangxi and fled west. A year and some 9,000 kilometres later, after river crossings under fire, snow passes and a high-altitude swamp, a few thousand survivors reached northern Shaanxi. On the way, Mao Zedong rose to lead the party, and the retreat became its founding legend. The route follows the Central Red Army, the best-known of several Long March columns, in date order. Official histories have polished some episodes, and historians still argue about how much fighting there was at Luding Bridge; the texts note where accounts disagree. Most stops now have memorials and museums.
In 1324 Mansa Musa, ruler of the Mali Empire, set out on the pilgrimage to Mecca with a caravan so rich in gold that Cairo talked about it for years. Arab chroniclers wrote of thousands of servants carrying gold bars and camels loaded with gold dust; historians today treat those numbers as a way of saying "more than anyone could imagine", not as a count. The Catalan Atlas of 1375 still shows him enthroned in the Sahara, holding up a piece of gold. The route keeps to the places the sources actually record: the royal city of Mali, the camp below the pyramids, Cairo, Mecca, and Gao and Timbuktu on the way home. The road across the desert is not documented, so it is not drawn. The route offers no travel advice for Mali.