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.
Forza Horizon 4, released on 2 October 2018, turns Great Britain into one giant racetrack: an open world with condensed representations of Edinburgh, the Scottish Highlands, the Lake District and the Cotswolds, where seasons change every week and Derwentwater freezes hard enough to drive across. Microsoft counted 24 million players by November 2020, and Polygon found the game world a theme-park version of England where everything has "the faint whiff of an idealised 1950s about it, a place of ordered pub gardens and rosebushes".
This route drives the real Britain behind the game, north to south: Edinburgh's Old Town, Bamburgh Castle on its coastal crag, three Lake District stops at Derwentwater, Ambleside and Tarn Hows, and the honey-coloured village of Broadway in the Cotswolds. Every stop can be visited today.
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.
In 1868, at the onset of the Second Industrial Revolution, twin Assassins Jacob and Evie Frye come to a London controlled by the Templars under Crawford Starrick, and set out to take the city back: building their street gang, the Rooks, across an open world of seven Victorian boroughs. Jacob works through Starrick's lieutenants while Evie hunts a Piece of Eden, the Shroud, from St Paul's to the Tower to a vault under Buckingham Palace.
This route follows both threads across the capital, then jumps forward: to Whitechapel in 1888, where Evie hunts Jack the Ripper in the expansion, and to Tower Bridge in 1916, where Jacob's granddaughter Lydia clears a German spy nest at Churchill's request. Every stop is a real building or district you can walk to.
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.
The second season of The White Lotus moves to a luxury resort in Sicily, following the staff and wealthy guests through a week of sightseeing days, villa parties and opera nights. Guests explore Taormina's Greek theatre, Daphne drags Harper down to Baroque Noto, and Tanya falls in with a wealthy Brit whose Palermo villa hides an ugly twist.
This route visits the real filming locations in episode order, from the San Domenico Palace hotel to the island beach of the finale. The show swaps two villas across the island: its Noto palace is really Villa Tasca outside Palermo, and Quentin's Palermo villa is Villa Elena near Noto.
The BBC's Sherlock Holmes and his flatmate, army doctor John Watson, solve crimes in present-day London, from a killer's phone traced to their own doorstep to a dominatrix with compromising photographs and a criminal who cracks the Crown Jewels from his mobile. Six stops follow the first three series in order: the 221B front door on North Gower Street, the Baker Street museum, a summons to Buckingham Palace, Moriarty's Tower heist, the hospital rooftop finale and a bomb under Parliament.
Most stops are London landmarks you can see from the street; the 221B door is a private house, and the palace, Tower, hospital and Parliament appear as the show's story settings.
A famous American actress walks into a Notting Hill travel bookshop, and its shy owner falls for her: that is the whole of Notting Hill, and somehow it is enough. Hugh Grant stammers, Julia Roberts glows, and London plays itself, from the market street of Portobello Road to a midnight garden and a press conference at the Savoy.
The route follows the film in story order, from the bookshop at 142 Portobello Road and the blue door at 280 Westbourne Park Road to the Ritz, a birthday party, the private garden, the Henry James set at Kenwood House and the Savoy finale. The flat interiors were studio sets and the garden is private, so some pins are for looking rather than entering.
Sophie is about to marry on Kalokairi, a fictional Greek island, and has secretly invited three men to the wedding — any of them could be her real father. Her mother Donna owns the hotel Villa Donna, and the paternity question follows everyone down the aisle.
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.
The 1965 film of Maria von Trapp's life was shot on real locations around Salzburg between March and September 1964, and almost all of them can still be visited. This route follows Maria from the mountain meadow and her abbey through the fountains and gardens of the song sequences to the villa terrace, the wedding church and the festival hall where the family sings its way to freedom.
The stops run in story order, from the Bavarian opening to the festival escape. One caveat: the famous cemetery hiding place never existed; it was a Hollywood studio set modelled on St Peter's Graveyard.
In 180 AD the Roman general Maximus leads the Roman army to victory against Germanic tribes, then refuses his loyalty to the new emperor and loses everything: his wife and son are murdered, and slave traders sell him to a gladiator trainer. Proximo takes him to fight in Rome's Colosseum, where he overpowers and kills Commodus in a final duel.
The route follows the shoot between January and May 1999: the Surrey wood where the Germania battle burned, the Val d'Orcia valley of Maximus' farm, the Moroccan ksar that played Zuccabar and the one-third Colosseum replica built on Malta's Fort Ricasoli — ending at the real Colosseum, where the story's final duel is set.
A chance meeting at the Criterion Bar sends an army doctor just back from Afghanistan to a laboratory at St Bartholomew's Hospital, where a stranger grips his hand and observes: "You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive." Within days Dr Watson has moved into 221B Baker Street, the address where many of the stories begin, and off runs the canon: four novels and 56 short stories, all but one set between 1880 and 1914.
This route walks Holmes's London in the order the stories appeared: the Criterion where Watson met Stamford, the hospital of the famous first deduction, the Baker Street rooms that did not exist when Doyle wrote and are now a museum, Scotland Yard's Victorian headquarters on the Embankment, a society church where a bride vanishes, a silent club on Pall Mall, and the Underground station where a body fell from a train roof.
Dom Cobb is offered a clean slate — his criminal history erased as payment for implanting an idea into a target's subconscious. To pull it off he recruits a forger, a chemist and an architecture student, then takes the team down through layered dreams, from a raining city to an alpine fortress.
This route follows the 2009 shoot across four countries: the Paris bridge that folds, a fictional bistro corner, Tangier standing in for Mombasa, two Los Angeles action sites and the closed Alberta ski resort that became the snow fortress. Two stops look different today: the bistro was a temporary set and the Heim Bridge has been replaced.
The Dune films are a two-part adaptation of Frank Herbert's 1965 novel. Paul Atreides travels from Caladan to the desert planet Arrakis, the harsh sole source of spice, and finally forces Emperor Shaddam to come to Arrakis with Irulan and his Sardaukar soldiers. Villeneuve filmed it all in real places: the deserts of Jordan and Abu Dhabi, a Norwegian peninsula, a Budapest studio and an Italian tomb.
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.
Tommy sets out for Seattle to hunt Abby, and Ellie and Dina follow him into a ruined city where the WLF militia and a cult, the Seraphites, fight for control. The Last of Us Part II plays the same three days twice: first as Ellie, then as Abby. The city is the real one: Naughty Dog chose Seattle for its hills and varied weather, and its artists travelled there to study the architecture, vegetation and topography.
This route follows both runs. Ellie's: the synagogue they call the Dome, the Pinnacle Theatre, the convention centre and its stalkers, the hospital and the aquarium. Abby's: the stadium she lives in, the Great Wheel of her memories, the Chinatown Gate and the Space Needle seen from the island. Many of the game's buildings carry new names; each stop names the real one behind it.
In 1715 a Welsh pirate kills an Assassin, steals his clothes and his name, and ends up sitting in his place at a meeting of Templars in Havana. That is how Edward Kenway enters the Golden Age of Piracy: he takes a ship, the Jackdaw, builds a pirate brotherhood in Nassau, loses his friends to the gallows and to each other, and spends the rest of the story chasing a device called the Observatory that can watch anyone on earth.
Black Flag sets all of it in real ports — Havana, Nassau, Kingston, Port Royal — and then leaves the Caribbean for the Maya ruins of Tulum, an island in the Gulf of Guinea and a final scene in London. The route follows Edward from the harbour where Torres's plot starts, through the pirate republic and the governor who ends it, to the Kingston house where Mary Read drops the disguise, the jail at Port Royal, Príncipe, where the Sage is waiting, and Covent Garden. Most stops mark a real landmark in the town the game rebuilds.
Jurassic Park (1993) invents a dinosaur theme park on an island that does not exist, then shoots almost all of it on one small Hawaiian island, Kauaʻi. On 11 September 1992, the last scheduled day of the Kauaʻi shoot, Hurricane Iniki passed directly over the island and pushed one famous sequence to a ranch on Oʻahu.
Nine stops follow the film in story order: the garden of the opening attack, the stream that played a Dominican amber mine, the Kapaʻa waterfront that played a Costa Rica café, the falls every visitor flies past, the estate where the visitor centre façade stood, the gates below Mount Waiʻaleʻale, the canyon of the dead fence, the Gallimimus stampede at Kualoa Ranch and the garden where Grant finds the nest. Filming on Kauaʻi began on 24 August 1992.
Liberty City is New York with the labels peeled off. Grand Theft Auto IV rebuilds four of the boroughs, borrows New Jersey for the state across the river, and copies in the Statue of Liberty, the Coney Island Cyclone, the Manhattan Bridge, Times Square and the Empire State Building — then renames nearly all of them, so the game's Liberty statue holds a takeaway coffee instead of a torch. The story is set in 2008, the year the game arrived.
This route pins nine real places behind those names: the triumphal arch at Brooklyn's Grand Army Plaza, the wooden Cyclone at Coney Island, the Manhattan Bridge as the Algonquin Bridge, Brighton Beach as Hove Beach, the surviving 1964 World's Fair site in Queens, and three Manhattan landmarks — Middle Park, Star Junction and the Rotterdam Tower. Each stop names the in-game location it stands in for. One caveat: Rockstar deliberately avoided a precise recreation of New York, so expect the landmarks, not the street plan.
Daniel Craig's first Bond bleeds, loses at cards and gets his boss a dressing-down, and the film's geography plays tricks of its own: Montenegro is a Czech spa town, Madagascar is an abandoned building site in Nassau, and the House of Commons is a monastery library in Prague.
The route follows the film from the black-and-white opening in a Prague office block to the digger chase on a Bahamian building site, a Paradise Island resort, the casino and hotel of Karlovy Vary, the Lake Como villa where Bond recovers from poison, the Venetian palazzo that sinks with Vesper inside, and the Lake Como house where Bond finally gives his name. Two stops are hotels and one is a monastery library you can walk into; the digger site is now inside a military base.
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.
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.
A gentleman of La Mancha, a head full of chivalry books, a plain full of mills: this route follows Don Quixote from the village argued to be his to the strand of Barcelona, keeping the order of the book.
It begins with the village whose name the narrator refuses to give, the inn where a landlord reading from his account book dubs him a knight, and the ridge of mills that shivered his lance to pieces. In Part II it follows him to Dulcinea's town by night, the cave where he sleeps an hour and believes three days have passed, the lakes of Ruidera, and finally Barcelona, where galley crews salute him three times and a bachelor from his own village unhorses him.
Which mills he charged, and where the inn of that first night stood, are guesses: Campo de Criptana and Puerto Lápice are the usual answers.
James Joyce's Ulysses is one ordinary day, 16 June 1904, in Dublin, told in eighteen episodes through Leopold Bloom, a Jewish advertisement canvasser, and Stephen Dedalus, who starts the day in a tower by the sea. This route walks the day in the order the novel runs it: from the Martello tower at Sandycove where it opens to Howth Head, where Molly Bloom's memory ends it with a yes.
Almost every stop is a place you can still stand in: the tower where Joyce stayed in 1904, the strand Stephen walks, the street of the chemist's where Bloom buys soap, the cemetery of the funeral, the pub where he eats his sandwich, the library where he passes between Stephen and Mulligan, the quay of the Ormond Hotel and the maternity hospital. The last stop is a recollection rather than a setting: the novel never says where on Howth Head the two of them lay.
