Catalog
55 routes found
Two Godzillas, sixty years apart, wreck the same city. In 1954 he comes out of Tokyo Bay at Shinagawa and walks into Ginza; in Shin Godzilla (2016) he lands at Kamata, mutates at Kitashinagawa and is finally frozen beside Tokyo Station. The route follows the 1954 film first, then Shin Godzilla, using the places named in each story. Where a scene was shot elsewhere, the stop says so.
The French Way is the most popular route of the ancient pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, It starts at Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, crosses the Pyrenees, and from Roncesvalles on the Spanish side still runs about 780 kilometres west to Galicia. It is on the UNESCO World Heritage List. This route follows it through seven landmarks: a mountain gate, a village of legend, a pilgrims' bridge, a great cathedral, a knights' tournament, a Galician hilltop and the tomb of St James.
Pedro Almodóvar has shot the majority of his films in Madrid, and Madrid's tourism office lists the exact streets, bars and squares where his scenes happened. The route follows eight filming spots in order of release, from the El Rastro bar of Labyrinth of Passion in 1982 to the Comendadoras square of Parallel Mothers in 2021, with one detour to Almagro in La Mancha for Volver.
Washington Irving came to Granada in 1829 and ended up living in a palace of the Moorish kings. With a 17-year-old local guide named Mateo Ximenes at his elbow, he gathered the legends that became Tales of the Alhambra in 1832. This route follows the book through six places: the gate with the magic hand and key, Irving's rooms, the Hall of Ambassadors, the Court of Lions, the Generalife and the Tower of the Princesses. Several tales are legend as much as history, so the pins mark the places where Irving tells them.
Spain's oldest surviving epic poem follows Rodrigo Díaz, the Cid, from a humiliating exile out of Castile to the conquest of Valencia, and then to a trial in Toledo after his sons-in-law abandon his daughters. The route runs from Vivar and Burgos through Cardeña and Valencia to Corpes and Toledo. The poem and the historical Cid differ in many details, and the site of Corpes is disputed.
A Russian legend, sometimes called the Russian Atlantis, says a whole city sank into a lake rather than fall to the Mongols, and that on calm days you can still hear its bells. Rimsky-Korsakov turned it into an opera, and Werner Herzog went looking for it with a camera. The route follows the story from the folk etymology of the name, through the town said to be Little Kitezh and the forests of the Kerzhenets, to the lake itself and the St Petersburg stage where the opera first sounded. Kitezh is a legend: the places are traditional identifications, not proof.
In 1466 or 1468 a merchant from Tver set out down the Volga to trade around the Caspian Sea. He was robbed on the way, crossed Persia, sailed from Hormuz to India and wrote down what he saw in A Journey Beyond the Three Seas. This route follows him from Tver through Derbent, Hormuz and the coast of India to Bidar, and home to Caffa on the Black Sea. Dates are debated, and most stops are marked by area only because his notes name towns rather than buildings.
The Old English poem Beowulf is set in Denmark and Sweden, and a surprising number of its kings, battles and halls turn up in Scandinavian sources and in the ground. Follow the hero from his Geatish homeland to Hrothgar's hall, then to the raid in Frisia, the royal mounds at Uppsala, and the English ship burial and library shelf where the poem survived. Most identifications here are traditional rather than proven, and the pins say so.
Fionn mac Cumhaill is the hero of Irish legend who gained all knowledge by burning his thumb on a salmon, saved Tara from a fire-breather and, in folk tales, built the Giant's Causeway to reach a Scottish rival. His stories are tied to real hills, rivers and rocks, many of them still named for him. The route follows his legend from the Boyne of his boyhood through Tara, the Hill of Allen, Slieve Gullion and Benbulben, then to the tall tales of Lough Neagh, the Causeway and Fingal's Cave. Nothing here is history: pins mark where tradition places each tale.
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.
A dragon-slayer's hoard, two queens quarrelling at a cathedral door, a murder at a spring, and a revenge that takes thirteen years: the medieval epic of the Nibelungs is the great German tale of betrayal. Its first half is set around Worms on the Rhine, its second ends at the court of Etzel, king of the Huns. This route follows the story from Siegfried's home in Xanten to Worms, to the Odenwald, and then east along the Danube to Tulln and Pöchlarn. Several sites are local traditions, not proof; the poem itself is vague about most places.
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.
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.
Two friends set out for a weekend at a fishing cabin, and one violent night at a roadhouse bar turns the trip into a run for Mexico across the American West. Ridley Scott's 1991 film is set on a route from Arkansas to the Grand Canyon, but it was filmed almost entirely in California and Utah, around Bakersfield and Moab, between June and August 1990. This route follows the story in film order through six real places: a Long Beach bar, a Los Angeles motel, a Colorado general store, the desert at Arches, the ghost town of Cisco and the cliff edge at Dead Horse Point. Almost all of them stand in for somewhere else, and each stop says where.
Bohemia, 1403. Henry of Skalitz and Sir Hans Capon ride to Trosky Castle to find out which side Otto von Bergow is on, and the civil war between King Wenceslaus IV and King Sigismund drags them from the rocks of the Bohemian Paradise to the silver city of Kuttenberg, today Kutná Hora. The 2025 sequel by Warhorse Studios recreates its two big maps from real castles, villages and streets. The route follows the story from Trosky to the siege of Suchdol. The game's version of each place is a 1403 reconstruction, so look for the castle ruins and rebuilt keeps rather than the exact buildings Henry sees. The first game's story ends just before it, so this route picks up at Trosky.
A schoolgirl in Kyushu follows a stranger into an abandoned resort, opens a door that was meant to stay shut, and ends up chasing a cat across Japan, closing doors as she goes. Her last door stands in the hometown she lost to the 2011 tsunami. The route follows her path in story order: Nichinan harbour, the Bungo-Mori roundhouse, Yawatahama port, a Kobe mountain, Ochanomizu and Hijiri Bridge in Tokyo, then Miyako and Orikasa Station in Iwate. The film is animated, so most pins mark places that Wikipedia says its scenes were modelled on, and the Kobe amusement park is disputed.
Robin Hood is known from medieval ballads, and the oldest of them are set as much in Yorkshire's Barnsdale and in Nottingham as in Sherwood. This route follows A Gest of Robyn Hode and its companions, from the Sorrowful Knight's first dinner in the greenwood to Robin's death at the priory. None of these places can be proved: every identification is a tradition, and the legend is not history. Each stop names the ballad that tells its episode and says how firmly the place is tied to it.
King Arthur belongs to no single place. His story was built up by Geoffrey of Monmouth, Thomas Malory and many others, and this route follows it in the legend's own order: Merlin's dragons, Arthur's conception and coronation, his battles and court, the last fight, the sword in the water and Avalon. Every pin marks a real place that tradition has attached to an episode, not a site proven by history, and each stop says where the link is doubted.
Agatha Christie's 1937 mystery puts Hercule Poirot on holiday in Aswan, waiting to board the Nile steamer Karnak. Among his fellow passengers are a jilted woman stalking her ex-fiancé's honeymoon, her former friend the heiress, and a boulder that comes uncomfortably close to the bride. The route follows the steamer from Aswan to Wadi Halfa and ends at Karnak, where the 1978 film moves the falling stone. The novel itself puts that scene at Abu Simbel.
A cursed squire, a spectral hound and a moor that swallows ponies: Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes novel, serialised in The Strand Magazine in 1901–02, is set largely on Dartmoor, and several of its places have real counterparts. The route runs from the grave that may have inspired the legend and the ten-thirty train from Paddington to the convict prison at Princetown, the mire, the tors and the Stapletons' house. Baskerville Hall and Merripit House exist only in the book, so their pins mark a stand-in or nothing at all.
Kalos is Metropolitan France turned into a star-shaped Pokémon region. Lumiose City is inspired by Paris, its Prism Tower by the Eiffel Tower and its art museum by the Louvre; the Battle Château recalls Chenonceau on the Loire, the palais Chaydeuvre is the château de Versailles, and the stones outside Geosenge Town are the Carnac stones. The games never confirm their models — these are fan and encyclopaedia identifications — so every pin on this route is speculative. The route follows the story across the real France behind Kalos: the town where the adventure begins, Lumiose's iron tower, two châteaux and a royal palace, a coastal aquarium, the island tower where Mega Evolution is learned, the cathedral clock behind Anistar's sundial, the Breton megalith field where Team Flare hides its ultimate weapon, and an abandoned mine where the legendary Zygarde sleeps.
The Galar region is Britain played back as a game: a fictional land inspired by the United Kingdom, dotted with landmarks that recall Bath and York, crowned by a London of clock towers and football-stadium gyms. Eight gym cities, eight badges, and then the Champion's Cup in Wyndon, where Leon waits and the Darkest Day breaks. This route walks the real Britain behind that map, south to north and then beyond: a chalk giant, a lighthouse, Roman baths, a minster, a national stadium and a clock tower, plus the two downloadable lands, the Isle of Man and the snows of Scotland. Every identification is a fan or developer reading, never confirmed in the games, so every pin here is speculative.
Ron Howard's 2006 thriller, based on Dan Brown's 2003 novel, sends symbologist Robert Langdon and cryptologist Sophie Neveu from a murdered curator in the Louvre on a quest for the legendary Holy Grail — through a Paris church, a London Templar church and Newton's tomb to a Scottish chapel. The route follows the film's trail in story order, from the Vitruvian-Man murder and the Saint-Sulpice marker to the Temple Church dead end, the APPLE cryptex at Westminster Abbey and the 'neath-the-rose finale at Rosslyn Chapel. Note the abbey scenes were filmed at Lincoln and Winchester cathedrals.