Pixar's Coco follows the boy Miguel from his shoemaking family's town of Santa Cecilia into the Land of the Dead on the Day of the Dead. Neither world exists on a map, but the filmmakers drew on real Mexican villages, families and festivals, and Mexican guides have since linked more places to it.
This route follows five of those places in the order the story needs them. Almost every link is an inspiration, not a filming location, and the pins say so.
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.
The S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games send scavengers called stalkers through the Zone, a radioactive wasteland built from the real Chernobyl exclusion zone. The developers copied bridges, railways and buildings from photographs and visits, then bent the geography for gameplay.
This route goes from the edge of the Zone to the reactor, setting each game location beside its real counterpart. The real zone is restricted and trespassers are prosecuted, so this is a map to read, not a trip to plan.
Twenty years after a nuclear war, the survivors of Moscow live in the Metro, and a young man named Artyom must carry a warning from his home station across the whole network. The novel and the game built on it use real station names, so you can follow Artyom's trip on an ordinary city map.
The route runs from VDNKh in the north through Kitay-gorod, Paveletskaya and Kievskaya to the Ostankino Tower. The book and the game differ in places; where they do, the text says so. The library stop is a likely match, not a named place.
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.
Team Ninja's open-world samurai game drops a masterless Blade Twin into the last years of the shogunate. Between 1858 and 1868 the story runs from Yokohama's foreign quarter through the killing of a Chief Minister to Kyoto's Shinsengumi and a plot to burn Edo.
This route follows the game's main story through seven places, from the port to the capital, pairing each scene with the real site that history ties to it. Where the game names only a district, the pin marks the nearest well-known landmark.
In 1191 the Assassin Altaïr bungles a mission, loses his rank and wins it back one target at a time: nine men in three cities, all of them secretly working for the Templars. The 2007 game sends you riding across the Holy Land to find them, and ends with a twist waiting at home.
The route follows the story from the Temple in Jerusalem to the Assassins' fortress of Masyaf, through Damascus, Acre and Jerusalem, to a duel in King Richard's camp. The game's cities are rebuilt for play, so every pin marks the real place the scene is anchored to.
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.
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.
On 16 July 1969 a Saturn V lifted the Apollo 11 crew off a Florida launch pad; eight days later their capsule dropped into the Pacific. In between, the first people walked on another world while an estimated 600 million watched on Earth.
The route follows the mission through six stops: the launch pad in Florida, Mission Control in Houston, Tranquility Base on the Moon, the Australian dish that carried the moonwalk pictures, the splashdown and the capsule's museum home. The Moon stop has no pin because the map shows Earth only; its lunar coordinates are given in the text.
In December 1933, eighteen-year-old Patrick Leigh Fermor set off from the Hook of Holland to walk to Constantinople, carrying a few clothes, some letters of introduction, an anthology of English verse and a volume of Horace. He slept in barns and shepherds' huts, but gentry and aristocracy kept inviting him into their country houses. He wrote the journey up decades later in A Time of Gifts, Between the Woods and the Water and The Broken Road.
The route follows him through ten places the sources let us pin, from the Hook and a Stuttgart apartment to Melk, Vienna, Prague, the bridge into Hungary, an island on the Danube that now lies under water, Plovdiv and Istanbul. Many pins are approximate: the sources name a town, not the exact spot where he stood.
At 11:30 a.m. on 29 May 1953 Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay stood on the summit of Mount Everest, the first people confirmed to have done so. They were part of a British expedition led by Colonel John Hunt, which in the end amounted to over four hundred men, including twenty Sherpa guides and 362 porters.
The route follows that expedition from winter training in Wales through Kathmandu, Thyangboche, Base Camp, the Khumbu Icefall, the Western Cwm and the South Col to the summit, then to the telegraph runner's stop at Namche Bazaar. Pins above Base Camp mark the terrain, not the exact camps of 1953.
Huck Finn fakes his own murder and, with Jim, who has run away from slavery, takes a raft down the Mississippi. Their goal is Cairo, where Jim would be a free man the minute he saw it. They miss it in the fog and drift on into slave country, past a feud, two con men and a farm with the book's last twist.
Twain built St. Petersburg from his boyhood town of Hannibal. Most places in the novel are invented, so each pin marks a real landmark or stand-in, and the Grangerfords' country and Bricksville stay off the map.
Tom Ripley is paid $1,000 to travel to Italy and persuade Dickie Greenleaf to return to the United States. Claiming to be a former Princeton classmate, he slides into Dickie's life, and a friendship at the seaside turns into a trail of lies and killings.
The route follows the film's order through Ischia and Procida, Anzio, Naples, Rome and Venice. Many places play other places: Ischia and Procida stand in for the fictional village of Mongibello, Anzio plays San Remo, and the "Roman" opera house is in Naples.
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.
Nine years after a night in Vienna, Jesse is on a book tour in Europe when Céline walks into his reading in a Paris bookshop. He has an hour before his flight, and they spend it wandering the city. Richard Linklater's 2004 film plays in real time: the story lasts about as long as the film, roughly eighty minutes.
It was shot in 15 days across Paris, and its locations jump about more than the dialogue admits. This route follows the film's order from the Left Bank bookshop through the Marais and the east of the city to the Seine and a gated courtyard in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine.
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.
Private First Class Ronald "Red" Daniels lands on Omaha Beach on D-Day with the 1st Infantry Division and fights his way into Germany with one squad, until a friend is captured and the search for him ends at a concentration camp. Call of Duty: WWII is a 2017 game by Sledgehammer Games, and its campaign is set among real battles.
The route follows the missions in order: Omaha Beach, Marigny, Aachen, the Hürtgen Forest, the Ardennes, the bridge at Remagen and Berga, with the real battle each one echoes. Pins mark battle areas, not a mission's exact street.
Forza Horizon 5 drops the Horizon Festival into a fictionalised Mexico, on a map 50% larger than Forza Horizon 4's. Creative director Mike Brown calls Mexico almost the whole world in one country: snowy peaks, tropical jungles, epic canyons, beautiful beaches, ancient architecture and modern cities.
This route visits seven real places the game recreates, from a sea arch at the tip of Baja to a canyon with a train, and says what the game does at each. The map is a condensed Mexico, so the pins mark the real sites, not their positions in the game.
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.
Downton Abbey is set on a fictional Yorkshire estate between 1912 and 1925, but its great house stands in Hampshire and its village in Oxfordshire. This route follows the story, from the Titanic news of series 1 to the royal visit of the 2019 film, to the real places behind it.
It takes in Highclere Castle, Bampton's church and library, a prison in Lincoln, castles in Scotland and Northumberland, the Ealing stage where the kitchen was built, and the film's parade village and York streets. Lacock's pin marks the village, as the sources name no exact spot.
On 20 September 1519 five ships and about 270 men sailed from Spain to find a western sea road to the Spice Islands. Magellan died in the Philippines, but Juan Sebastián Elcano brought the Victoria home three years later with eighteen survivors and 26 tons of spices, having sailed all the way around the world.
The route follows the voyage from the mouth of the Guadalquivir past Port St. Julian, through the strait and across the Pacific to the Moluccas, then home past the Cape of Good Hope. Anchorages are often unrecorded, so most pins mark the nearest known place; the dates come from Pigafetta's journal and modern accounts.
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.
Ghost of Yōtei follows Atsu, a wandering mercenary who returns to Ezo — modern-day Hokkaido — in 1603 to hunt down the Yōtei Six, the band led by the samurai lord Nariaki Saito who slaughtered her family sixteen years earlier. Her revenge carries her across an island modelled on Hokkaido, from the grasslands at Mount Yōtei's foot to the frozen north and the Matsumae clan's castle in the south.
This route follows the game's regions and their real counterparts: the Yotei Grasslands around Lake Shikotsu, the Ishikari Plain, the Ainu country of the Nayoro Wilds, the Kitsune's Teshio Ridge, and the Tokachi Range, with Mount Yōtei and Matsumae Castle as its fixed points.
