A Cornish knight fetches an Irish princess for his uncle the king, and a love potion on the ship ruins everything. Tristan and Iseult is a medieval legend told in many versions since the 12th century, and every retelling sets it on a slightly different map.
This route follows the lovers from Tristan's drowned homeland to Dublin, Cornwall and Brittany, ending on the island that carries his name. Almost every site is a tradition rather than a fact, so each pin says how sure it is.
Heracles' first six labours are set across the Peloponnese: Tiryns, Nemea and its lion, Lerna and its Hydra, Ceryneia, Erymanthos and Elis. He must kill a lion no arrow pierces and a many-headed Hydra, and clean a stable of thirty years' dung.
This route follows the first six labours in their traditional order, from the fortress of Tiryns through Nemea, Lerna, Ceryneia, Erymanthos and Elis to Lake Stymphalia. The myth rarely names an exact spot, so most pins mark the place the tale is tied to, not a cave or a lair.
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 June 1995 Cheryl Strayed, 26 and with no hiking experience, set out alone to walk 1,100 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail. Her memoir Wild reached No. 1 on the New York Times Best Seller list, and Reese Witherspoon played her in the 2014 film.
This route follows the hike north from the Mojave Desert to the Columbia River, using the memoir's outline and the film's best-known scenes. The film compresses and dramatises, so stops drawn from it say so, and pins mark areas rather than campsites.
Toru Watanabe, a drama student in late-1960s Tokyo, looks back on the years he spent between two women: Naoko, the fragile girlfriend of his dead best friend, and Midori, a classmate who is everything Naoko is not. Haruki Murakami's 1987 novel made him a superstar in Japan.
The route follows Watanabe across the city: his dormitory, a long Sunday walk by the moat, Naoko's apartment in Kokubunji, the campus, the streetcar to Midori's neighbourhood, a house at the edge of Kichijōji and the platform at Ueno. Murakami drew on his own student years, but the novel's dormitory and university are invented, so those two pins mark real stand-ins.
Santiago, a shepherd boy from Andalusia, keeps dreaming of treasure at the Egyptian pyramids. A fortune-teller and a mysterious old king send him across the strait to Africa, where he is robbed in Tangier, falls in love at an oasis and crosses a desert of warring tribes. Paulo Coelho's 1988 fable has sold more than 150 million copies.
The route follows the boy from a ruined church to the Giza plateau and back again. The book keeps its geography loose, so most pins mark the best-known place for a scene rather than a spot the author names.
A young bear stows away from Peru, turns up at Paddington station and is taken in by the Brown family. Paul King's 2014 film follows him through a cosy London of antique shops and a gentlemen's club, while a taxidermist closes in.
Most of it was shot on real London streets. This route runs from the station to Primrose Hill, Portobello Road, Pall Mall and the Natural History Museum, with one caveat: the film's station front door is borrowed from Marylebone.
Jesse and Céline are now a couple with twin daughters, on a summer holiday in southern Greece. Before Midnight, the third and final film of Richard Linklater's Before trilogy, was shot in 15 days on the Peloponnese coast and turns one last night into a long, honest argument about love.
The route follows the film from an airport farewell to a writer's house, a castle, a harbour town and a resort hotel. The filmmakers have named few exact addresses, so the Pylos and hotel stops are approximate.
Gil Pender is a screenwriter with a nostalgia problem, in Paris with a fiancée and her wealthy parents. Every night at midnight a 1920s car pulls up and carries him back to the 1920s, among the Fitzgeralds, Hemingway and the surrealists. By day he is stuck in 2010.
This route follows the film from Monet's garden at Giverny to Pont Alexandre III, with the stops placed from a film-locations guide: where the 1920s scenes are shot you can still sit, eat and shop today. The party and flea-market scenes are approximate.
The Kanto of Pokémon Red and Blue is based on the real Kantō region of Japan: fans match Pallet Town to Machida, Vermilion City to Yokohama, Celadon City to Shinjuku and Lavender Town to Narita. You start in a quiet town, beat eight gym leaders and take on Team Rocket.
This route follows the game's journey from Pallet Town to the final gym and sets each stop beside the real place it is said to resemble. The game's Kanto is inspired by the real one, not a copy of it, so every pin is an outside reading of the map, not an official location.
Studio Ghibli's worlds feel lived-in because Miyazaki went to look at real places: a Welsh mining museum for the village in Castle in the Sky, Visby for the town of Kiki's Delivery Service, the harbour of Tomonoura before Ponyo. Other links are only rumoured, and he has denied at least one, the town of Jiufen in Taiwan for Spirited Away.
This route follows eight films in release order, from 1986 to 2008, and pairs each with the real place reported as its inspiration. Only some of these identifications come from Miyazaki himself, so every stop says whose claim it is, and none of them is a filming location.
Bob is a fading American movie star in Tokyo to advertise whiskey; Charlotte is a disillusioned recent graduate, married for two years. Both are far from home, and they find each other at the Park Hyatt Tokyo.
The route follows their story in the film's order: the neon streets of Shinjuku, the hotel, Shibuya Crossing and a karaoke room, then Charlotte's day trip to Kyoto Station, Nanzen-ji and Heian Shrine. Coppola shot for just 27 days, many of its locations in real places of business and public areas. The karaoke branch is pinned approximately.
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.
Les Misérables on a map: Jean Valjean's road from the bishop's house at Digne to Montreuil-sur-Mer, the Thénardiers' inn at Montfermeil, Marius's bench in the Luxembourg, the barricade of June 1832 and the sewers and bridges of Paris. Victor Hugo's 1862 novel follows the convict from the night a bishop's kindness turns him towards good to the street fighting in the capital.
Hugo hid two of the towns behind initials and the wine-shop barricade has been built over, so only the Luxembourg Garden is pinned exactly; the other stops mark real places standing in for the book's.
Tatooine is the Star Wars desert everyone knows, but the films kept finding other corners of the Earth for their galaxy: redwoods in northern California, a villa on Lake Como, a plaza in Seville, the desert around an oasis in Abu Dhabi, a monastery island off County Kerry and the largest salt flat in the world, in Bolivia.
This route follows the shooting in the order the films were made, from the Endor forest of Return of the Jedi to the Crait battle of The Last Jedi. Two stops mark an area rather than a spot: the Endor scenes were partly shot on private land, and no source names the stretch of desert that stood in for Jakku.
Crown Princess Ann, on a goodwill tour of Rome, slips out of her embassy for one night of ordinary life. Reporter Joe Bradley finds her asleep in the street, recognises her from a newspaper photograph, and secretly guides her through the city to land an exclusive — a day of ice cream, a Vespa and the Mouth of Truth that turns into something neither of them planned.
William Wyler's 1953 comedy was shot almost entirely in Rome. The route follows Ann and Joe through the real locations: the palace that played the embassy, Joe's flat on Via Margutta, the Trevi and the barber by the Spanish Steps, the Colosseum, the Bocca della Verità, the riverside dance beside Castel Sant'Angelo and the closing press conference at Palazzo Colonna.
In about 1986 a boy of five or six fell asleep on an empty train in central India and woke up nearly 1,500 kilometres away in Calcutta, unable to name his home town. Adopted by a couple in Tasmania, Saroo Brierley found his way back 25 years later by tracing railway lines on Google Earth. His memoir A Long Way Home became the 2016 film Lion, with Dev Patel as the grown-up Saroo and Nicole Kidman as his adoptive mother.
The route follows the real journey, which the film tells closely, from Khandwa station to Burhanpur, Howrah and Hobart, and back to Khandwa. Family homes are private and not pinned.
One night at Cruachan, Queen Medb of Connacht and her husband Ailill compare their riches and find them equal in all but one thing: Ailill owns a magnificent white-horned bull. Medb sets out to take an even finer one, the Brown Bull of Cooley, from Ulster, whose warriors are all laid low by an ancient curse. Only the seventeen-year-old Cú Chulainn stands in her way, holding off her army ford by ford, one champion a day.
The Táin Bó Cúailnge, "the Cattle Raid of Cooley", is the centrepiece of Ireland's Ulster Cycle, preserved in manuscripts from the 12th century on. Its storytellers loved explaining place-names, and many of its places are real and visitable. This route follows the raid from Connacht to Cooley and the bull's last journey home. Quotations are from Joseph Dunn's 1914 translation.
In November 1274 a Mongol and Korean fleet landed on Tsushima, a mountainous Japanese island halfway to Korea, and overwhelmed its few defenders. Sucker Punch's 2020 game drops a fictional samurai, Jin Sakai, into that invasion: he survives the massacre on the beach and turns into "the Ghost", a guerrilla who breaks the samurai code to drive the invaders out.
The designers visited Tsushima twice but did not copy it one to one. This route visits the real places behind the game's opening battle, its castle and its shrines, most of them featured in the island's own guide for players. Jin, his clan and his battles are fiction; the landing, the fortress and the mountains are not.
Fallout: New Vegas rebuilds the real Mojave: Goodsprings, Primm, Nipton, Searchlight, Boulder City and Hoover Dam are all on its map. In 2281 a courier carrying a platinum poker chip is shot and left in a shallow grave, survives and hunts the man who did it, into a war for the desert between the New California Republic, Caesar's Legion and Mr. House.
The designers built the map from US Geological Survey data and photographs of the real desert, so the game's road south from Goodsprings and back up to Las Vegas runs through real towns. The route follows that road. The towns' massacres, radiation and battles are fiction; their saloons, roller coasters and dam are not.
In April 1947 the Norwegian Thor Heyerdahl and five companions pushed off from Peru on a raft of nine balsa logs, built in the style of old Spanish drawings of South American rafts. They meant to prove that ancient people could have drifted from South America to Polynesia. After 101 days and almost 7,000 kilometres on the open Pacific, they crashed onto a coral reef in the Tuamotus — and all six walked ashore.
The voyage became a bestselling book and an Oscar-winning documentary. Heyerdahl's theory, though, has not survived: archaeology, language and genetics show that Polynesians came from the west, from Island Southeast Asia, as master navigators. The route follows the raft from Callao to Tahiti.
Ida Pfeiffer's 1846–1848 journey around the world passed through Hamburg, the Brazilian forest, Tahiti and Baghdad, as her own book A Woman's Journey Round the World recounts. A 48-year-old Viennese widow with little money, she travelled mostly alone by cargo ship, horseback and caravan, and came home to a Vienna in revolution.
The route follows her first world journey in order, from her own book, A Woman's Journey Round the World: Hamburg, the Brazilian forest, Cape Horn and Valparaíso, Tahiti, Canton, Baghdad, Persia and home. There are no visitor tips for Iraq or Iran.
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.
The Grand Budapest Hotel's imaginary republic of Zubrowka is built from real Saxony: Görlitz's Art Nouveau department store as the lobby, Hainewalde and Waldenburg castles, Osterstein in Zwickau and Dresden's Zwinger. In Wes Anderson's comedy the concierge M. Gustave and his lobby boy Zero are caught up in a murder, a stolen painting and a war.
This route visits the real buildings: an empty Art Nouveau department store that became the hotel lobby, a shuttered concert hall, two castles that make up Madame D.'s estate, a former prison, the most beautiful dairy shop in the world and Dresden's baroque Zwinger. Zubrowka is fictional; these are the filming locations.
