Catalog
32 routes found
Port Royal and Tortuga were built on a quiet St Vincent bay, Cannibal Island is Dominican rainforest, and a private Bahamian cay sits behind a famous duel. This route follows the shoots from St Vincent in 2002 through Dominica in 2005 to Grand Bahama, where the ships were filmed in a hurricane season. Most pins mark areas, not exact sets; the sets themselves were built and taken down.
Bong Joon-ho's celebrated thriller follows the Kim family from a semi-basement flat to a rich family's villa, and the film's stairs make the class divide physical. The real shops, stairs and tunnel behind those scenes can still be walked across Seoul. The route runs from a corner store in Ahyeon-dong to the Jahamun Tunnel and the Goyang flood set. Both family homes were sets, so the houses themselves are not on the map.
Grigory Melekhov loves another man's wife, goes to war, and changes sides in the Civil War four times. Sholokhov's novel of the Don Cossacks grew out of the Upper Don, and its landscape is still there. The route moves from the invented hamlet of Tatarsky to Vyoshenskaya, the stanitsa of the 1919 uprising, then to the villages where Sholokhov lived and wrote. Tatarsky and the monument are marked approximately.
Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy is a Stockholm novel before it is a thriller: journalist Mikael Blomkvist and hacker Lisbeth Salander live, drink and work on Södermalm, the island district where much of the action takes place. This route walks the real addresses behind the books, from Blomkvist's home on Bellmansgatan to Lisbeth's penthouse on Fiskargatan, and ends at the City Museum that runs the official tour. Some addresses are private homes, so most are seen from the street.
In July 1497 four ships left Lisbon to find a sea route to India. Vasco da Gama's fleet crossed the open South Atlantic, rounded the Cape, worked its way up the African coast, and reached Calicut on 20 May 1498. The voyage ended with two ships and over half the men lost. The route follows the voyage from the Restelo shore in Lisbon to Calicut, then home via Anjediva and the Azores. Landing sites are mostly debated or only broadly known, so most pins are approximate. Dates are as the sources give them, in the Julian calendar then in use.
Detective Conan is the story of a teenage detective shrunk to a child's size, and its author comes from a small coastal town in Tottori, Japan. Gosho Aoyama was born in Daiei, now part of Hokuei, and the town has turned itself into Conan Town. The route visits the birthplace, the Conan-themed station, the bridge, the manga museum and the airport that carries Conan's name. The sources do not tie any story scene to these places, so the stops mark the town's own tributes.
The floating Hallelujah Mountains of Pandora do not exist, but the pillars behind them do. This route follows the film from its Los Angeles capture stage to the sandstone towers of Hunan, and on to the rival claim for Huangshan and the Pandora land in Florida. Expect inspiration rather than filming locations: the film was made largely on stages, so the Chinese pins are stand-ins and credited influences.
Ang Lee's wuxia romance sends a retired swordsman, a runaway governor's daughter and a stolen sword across a China that was assembled from many places. The film began shooting in Xinjiang on 31 July 1999 and then moved to the Jiangnan region and Beijing. This route follows the story through the real locations behind it: a desert ghost city, two Anhui villages, the Anji bamboo forest, and Cangyan Mountain, which plays the fictional Wudang. The real Mount Wudang sits in the story, but the film was not shot there.
Sun Wukong is born from a stone on a flowery mountain and later guards a monk on the long road west to fetch the sutras. The novel is set on the road to India, but its geography is almost entirely fantasy. This route follows five episodes in the novel's order and pins the real places that share their names or were later tied to them. Some are named in the text; Huaguo Shan and the Flaming Mountains are linked only by later tradition.
Sergio Leone's "spaghetti westerns" put the American West in southern Spain. Their Almería desert towns and the sets built for those films still stand. The route follows the desert and the white village of Los Albaricoques through three Leone films: A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and Once Upon a Time in the West. One stop lies over the border in Granada province.
Danila Bagrov comes home from the First Chechen War, goes to look for his older brother in Saint Petersburg and ends up a hitman by accident. In the sequel he is in Moscow and then Chicago, chasing the men who threaten a dead friend's twin brother. The route follows Danila through Vitebsky Station, the Adamini House, a market and a cemetery in Petersburg, then Moscow and the American stops. Several stops are filming locations standing in for the story's places.
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.
Pushkin's only completed novel follows Pyotr Grinev, a young officer sent to a log-fenced fortress on the Orenburg steppe, where he falls in love with the captain's daughter Masha and crosses paths with Pugachev, the rebel who claims to be Emperor Peter III. The book is a romanticized account of Pugachev's Rebellion of 1773-1774, not a record of it. The route follows the novel from besieged Orenburg through the Belogorsk fortress, Berda, Kazan, Tsarskoye Selo and Moscow. Each stop separates what Pushkin invented from what history records; Belogorsk exists only on the page, with the real fortress of Tatishchevo as its stand-in.
Sound! Euphonium follows the Kitauji High School concert band, and its story is set in Uji, Kyoto. The route follows Kumiko's commute on the Keihan Uji Line, crosses Uji Bridge, joins the Agata Festival and climbs Daikichiyama for the view of town. The school itself is fictional, so the route pins a real station in its place.
Takumi Fujiwara delivers tofu every morning in his father's old Toyota AE86, and without knowing it he becomes the fastest downhill driver in Gunma. Shuichi Shigeno's street racing manga sends him against rival teams from mountain after mountain. Some names are fictionalized, but all of the locations in the series are based on actual places in Japan. The route follows them from Mount Haruna, the real Akina, to Akagi, Myōgi and Irohazaka, then returns to the lake and to the museum that keeps the tofu shop's storefront.
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.
The greatest of the Icelandic sagas is a story of two friends, one famous for his strength and one for his wisdom, and of how a chain of insults, killings and neat legal settlements drags both families towards a night of fire. It is told almost entirely in real places in south and south-west Iceland. The route runs from the national assembly at Þingvellir, where Gunnar meets his future wife, through Gunnar's farm at Hlíðarendi, an ice-bank leap on the Markarfljót and the Law Rock, to Njáll's farm at Bergþórshvoll. The saga names the farms, but not every exact spot, so some pins mark the area.
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.
Tolstoy's huge novel carries its aristocratic families from the drawing rooms of 1805 into the wars against Napoleon, and its battlefields are among the most famous in fiction: a forgotten battery, a wounded prince staring at the sky, a civilian in a white hat on the wrong hill at the right moment. The route follows the book from a Moscow house and a country estate through Schöngrabern and Austerlitz to 1812: Borodino, the council at Fili and Napoleon waiting on Poklonnaya Hill. Some stops are real places Tolstoy wrote about, others are real stand-ins for places that exist only in the novel; each says which. Dates follow the modern calendar, with Tolstoy's Old Style date noted where it differs.
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.
In Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, Ethan Hunt races a rogue artificial intelligence called the Entity for a two-piece key that can control it. The chase crosses the Empty Quarter, Abu Dhabi, Rome and Venice before a night train runs into the Alps and a bridge is blown. 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.
A CIA officer called the Protagonist joins Tenet, a secret organisation fighting a war across time. Inverted bullets and a Russian oligarch named Sator pull him from a Kyiv opera house to Mumbai, Oslo, the Amalfi Coast and Tallinn, chasing a device sent back from the future. This route follows the film's real locations: Tallinn's Linnahall standing in for the Kyiv opera house, Colaba in Mumbai, the Oslo freeport sequence, the gardens of Villa Cimbrone above Amalfi, the Tallinn streets of the car chase and the California ghost town used for Stalsk-12. The Oslo Freeport and Stalsk-12 are fictional, so their pins mark the real places the film points to.
Gotham is Chicago. The film shot most of Batman's city on real streets and buildings in the Loop, dressing them up as Gotham, then flew the crew to Hong Kong for its one overseas detour. This route follows The Dark Knight in order, from the bank heist that opens it to the rooftop where Batman and the Joker have their last fight. Along the way: the disused post office that doubled as a bank, the glass office where Wayne holds a fundraiser, the financial street of the convoy chase, the hospital the Joker destroys, an old Chicago bar, the pier where two ferries wait, and Hong Kong's International Finance Centre.
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.