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.
Thelma & Louise runs from Arkansas to the Grand Canyon, but it was filmed in California and Utah, around Long Beach, Los Angeles, Arches and Dead Horse Point. One violent night at a roadhouse bar turns a weekend trip into a run for Mexico.
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.
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.
Battlefield 1 sends its soldiers across the Western Front, the Italian Front, Gallipoli and Arabia. This route follows the War Stories and multiplayer maps that go with them, from the Suez Canal in 1915 to Monte Grappa in October 1918.
Stops run in the order of the real battles, not the game's menu. The maps are the game's own reconstructions, so each pin marks the real ground behind a level, and one stop is a village the game invented.
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.
HBO's Game of Thrones prequel was filmed primarily in the United Kingdom, and its Velaryon world is Cornish: the island seat of Driftmark is a tidal island, and the Stepstones war camp is a cove on the Lizard peninsula. For the capital and the free city of Pentos, the crew went to western and southern Spain.
The route follows the story from the Stepstones war (season 1, episode 3) through the Driftmark episodes to King's Landing in season 2. Sources do not name the exact streets used in Cáceres, so that pin marks the old town.
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.
The Hound of the Baskervilles takes Sherlock Holmes across Dartmoor: Cabell's tomb at Buckfastleigh, the ten-thirty train from Paddington, Princetown's prison and Hound Tor. A spectral hound stalks the moor.
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.
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.
L.A. Noire rebuilds Los Angeles in 1947 with fanatical care: the studio mapped the real streets, modelled building interiors on the originals, and filled the map with the city's landmarks. Detective Cole Phelps drives that recreation through traffic, homicide, vice and arson cases, and much of the city he moves through is still standing.
This tour follows the real places behind the game's map, from Union Station and Bunker Hill to Wilshire's art deco and the Hollywood movie palaces, then down to the river where the story ends. Every pin marks a real site the game put on its streets.
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One sends Ethan Hunt across the Empty Quarter, Abu Dhabi, Rome and Venice for a two-piece key, with a cliff jump at Hellesylt and a train sequence doubled on a Yorkshire railway and in a Peak District quarry. The rogue AI Entity wants it too.
Almost every stop is a real place: the desert and airport in the Emirates, a car chase through Rome, a party at the Doge's Palace, a cliff jump at Hellesylt in Norway, and the Alpine train sequence doubled on a Yorkshire heritage railway and in a Peak District quarry.
Bond's final outing opens beside a lake in Norway and closes on an island in the Faroe Islands, with a long detour through southern Italy and a retirement in Jamaica in between. The story's geography is real: Matera's cave lanes, a bridge over the Gravina gorge, a railway station at Sapri, a waterfront house at Port Antonio, the Atlantic Ocean Road and the cliffs of Kalsoy.
The route follows the film's order — the frozen-lake flashback, the grave and the bridge, the Matera car chase, the farewell at Sapri, five quiet years in Jamaica and the 'Cuban' harbour that is really Port Antonio, then the Norway drive and the villain's island in the Faroe Islands. The beach house in Jamaica and the lake house in Norway were sets, both since dismantled.
A feather drifts down onto a bench in Savannah, and a man starts to talk. His life unrolls across half a century of American history, from an Alabama childhood to the jungles of Vietnam, the Lincoln Memorial, the Watergate and a bayou shrimp boat.
This route follows the film in order, from the bench on Chippewa Square to the lighthouse in Maine and the desert where the running finally stops. It marks the real locations and the real stand-ins, since the fictional town of Greenbow and the Vietnam jungle were both played by South Carolina.
Vice City is Miami with the labels peeled off. The 2002 game, set in 1986, follows gangster Tommy Vercetti's rise to power after prison, from an ambushed drug deal to the takeover of a drug lord's mansion. The developers built the world from extensive field research in Miami, and the plot draws on the city's real Cubans, Haitians and biker gangs.
This route pins six real places behind the fiction: the port of the opening ambush, the Ocean Drive strip behind Ocean Beach, Little Havana and Little Haiti with their warring gangs, Downtown's biker ground, and the private island behind the Starfish Island mansion. Every pin marks the real stand-in, and each stop names the game location it doubles for. One caveat: Vice City itself is fictional, so expect the flavour of 1980s Miami rather than a street-by-street copy.
Mamma Mia! sets fictional Kalokairi on Skopelos and Skiathos: the town below Villa Donna, the Old Port, Glysteri's rock jump and the wedding chapel of Agios Ioannis Prodromos. Sophie has secretly invited three possible fathers to her wedding.
Five stops on the real islands behind Kalokairi, where principal photography took place from August to September 2007: the town below the villa's hill, the Skiathos harbour where two of the men arrive in identical cabs, the cove of the diary reading and the rock jump, the main beach set with its vanished bar and jetty, and the rock-top chapel of the wedding. One caveat: there is no Villa Donna to visit — the hotel was a Pinewood set.
Dune turns real places into its planets: Norway's Stadlandet is Caladan, Jordan's Wadi Rum and Abu Dhabi's Liwa Oasis share Arrakis, Budapest's Origo Studios build Arrakeen and Italy's Brion tomb becomes the emperor's court. Paul Atreides leaves Caladan for the desert planet, the sole source of spice, then forces Emperor Shaddam to come to Arrakis with Irulan and his Sardaukar soldiers.
This route links the five key locations: Stadlandet standing in for Caladan, Wadi Rum and the Liwa Oasis sharing Arrakis, Origo Studios staging Arrakeen and the ornithopters, and the Brion tomb doubling as the imperial court. Part One shot from March to July 2019 in Hungary, Jordan, Norway and the Emirates; Part Two followed from July to December 2022, adding Italy and Namibia to the itinerary.
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) sends Indy from a Boy Scout outing in the Utah desert to the rock-cut façade of Petra, chasing the Holy Grail and his missing father. Three trials guard the cup at the end. The film borrows its scenery from half of Europe, the Middle East and the American West.
Nine stops, most of them still standing: the Arches canyons of the opening, the church façade in Venice's Campo San Barnaba that plays the library, an Eifel castle dressed as Brunwald, a San Francisco building that played Berlin's Tempelhof airport, the Almería beach where Henry brings down a fighter with an umbrella, a Granada station playing Alexandretta, the Tabernas tank chase, the Treasury that fronts the Grail's temple, and the Texas sunset the film ends on. Dates are story time; filming ran from May 1988 to early 1989.
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.
After a first season in Malta, the show crossed the Adriatic to a walled city. Dubrovnik's two-kilometre ramparts, the fortress above its western gate and its late-medieval streets played King's Landing for everything the effects departments could not invent: the name-day combats, the riot at the gate, Cersei's walk of atonement.
Eight stops run in the order the episodes aired — Lovrijenac and the Pile Gate in the second season, the Rector's Palace when Dubrovnik doubled as Qarth, the Red Keep's gardens at Trsteno and the Meereen stand-in at Klis in the third and fourth, and the Jesuit stairs where the fifth-season finale was shot in October 2014. Only the exteriors live here: the Red Keep and the Sept of Baelor were computer-generated.
Insomniac's Spider-Man games hand you a fictionalized modern-day New York and tell you to swing it. The first game maps Manhattan, from a sorcerer's doorstep in Greenwich Village to the square where a virus breaks out; the sequel adds Brooklyn and Queens, where Peter comes home to his late aunt's house and takes his friends to the amusements.
This tour follows that arc in seven stops: a fictional mansion, three skyscrapers, an outbreak square, a Queens street and a Brooklyn funfair. Every pin marks the real place behind the mission, and almost all of them can be visited on one long subway day.
Puyi became emperor of China at the age of two, lost the throne at six, and spent the rest of his life being used by others: as a puppet emperor for Japan in Manchuria, then as a war criminal re-educated in a Communist prison, and finally as an ordinary citizen working in a Beijing garden. Bernardo Bertolucci's 1987 epic, which won all nine Oscars it was nominated for, was the first Western feature film allowed to shoot inside the Forbidden City.
The route visits the real places of Puyi's life, most of them museums today. The film compresses and softens his story, and some of its scenes were shot in Italy.
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty goes from the Time-Life Building in New York to Iceland, where Stykkishólmur doubles for Greenland, Seyðisfjörður hosts the longboard descent and Skógafoss stands in for the Himalayas. Ben Stiller's 2013 film follows a photo editor chasing a missing negative.
This route starts at Life's real Manhattan home and then follows Walter through the Icelandic towns, harbour, mountain road, volcano and waterfall that stand in for Greenland and Afghanistan. The places are real; which country they play is not.
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.
Xuanzang's search for the original Buddhist scriptures runs from Chang'an across the Taklamakan's edge, the Tian Shan and the Hindu Kush to the Buddhas of Bamiyan, then on to Taxila, Kashmir and Nalanda. The monk left in 629 despite a Tang ban on foreign travel, and his record inspired Journey to the West.
His travel record, the Great Tang Records on the Western Regions, is still a key source for the history of Central Asia and India, and his journey inspired the classic novel Journey to the West. The route follows him there and back. There are no travel tips for Afghanistan.
