Before The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry flew the mail. He flew the Aéropostale line from Toulouse, ran the Cape Juby airfield, directed an airline in Buenos Aires and survived a crash in the Sahara that later fed his most famous book.
The route follows his life in the air, from the take-off strip at Montaudran to the sea off Marseille where his plane was found. The Sahara crash site is only an educated guess.
In 1974 Bruce Chatwin set out for Patagonia to find his own "piece of brontosaurus": a scrap of skin sent to his grandmother by her cousin, Charley Milward the sailor. Six months of travel became In Patagonia, the book that made his name.
This route follows the quest from a natural history museum in La Plata through the Welsh coast, Butch Cassidy's cabin and Milward's house in Punta Arenas, to the cave where the skin was found. Chatwin's tales were not always literal, so most pins mark areas, not scenes.
In January 1817 General José de San Martín led an army out of Mendoza and over the Andes to free Chile from Spanish rule. The crossing took 21 days, and the feat has been compared to Hannibal's and Napoleon's crossings of the Alps.
The route follows the campaign from the hill monument in Mendoza and the El Plumerillo camp, over the two passes the columns used, to the victories at Chacabuco and Maipú. The mountain stops are pinned approximately; the passes are long, and the army's exact tracks are not.
Horacio Oliveira, in Paris, spends his nights walking the city with the Maga and the Club de la Serpiente, until a baby's death breaks the group apart. Then the novel moves to Buenos Aires: a circus, a psychiatric clinic and a window over a courtyard.
The route follows the book's real Paris places, from the Pont des Arts to the Montparnasse cemetery, then its Buenos Aires scenes. Most Paris stops come from the Rutas Cervantes literary route; the Buenos Aires ones are invented and unpinned.
Jorge Luis Borges is the writer who turned a library into a metaphor for the universe, yet his own life ran through very real places in Buenos Aires: a poor Palermo childhood, a basement library job, and eighteen years as director of the National Library.
This route follows him from his birthplace barrio and a famous café to the two library buildings he knew, with one fictional stop: the Calle Garay house where "The Aleph" sees everything at once.
Agent 47 has killed his way across the world in the Hitman trilogy, from a Paris fashion show to a skyscraper in Dubai. Behind the levels stand real cities, a real tower and a few real places that inspired invented ones.
This route follows nine missions from the 2016 game to Hitman 3. Most venues are fictional, so the pins mark the city or the real place the designers named as a model, and each stop says which.
On 26 August 1768 the Endeavour left Plymouth with 94 people aboard, bound for Tahiti to watch Venus cross the Sun. Almost three years later she anchored off the Kent coast again, having reached New Zealand and the east coast of Australia, and with many of her people lost to disease on the way home.
The route follows James Cook's own journal and modern accounts through ten stops, from the anchorage at Plymouth to the Great Barrier Reef and Batavia. Dates follow modern accounts, which sometimes differ by a day from the journal.
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.
Egypt, 49 BC. Bayek, the last Medjay protector of the Siwa Oasis, loses his son to a band of masked men, and his hunt for them leads him into the war between Cleopatra and her brother Ptolemy XIII, and to the arrival of Julius Caesar. Ubisoft's 2017 game ends with Bayek and his wife Aya founding the secret brotherhood that the whole series grows from.
The studio worked with Egyptologists and historians, enlarged cities for a sense of "pharaonic scale", and later added a combat-free Discovery Tour. This route follows the main story through the real places it uses, from the oracle at Siwa to the spot in Rome where Caesar died. Bayek and the secret orders are fiction; the queen, the generals and the murders mostly are not.
In January 1952 Ernesto Guevara, a 23-year-old medical student from Buenos Aires, and his friend Alberto Granado, a 29-year-old biochemist, set off to cross South America on an old 1939 Norton 500 they called La Poderosa, "The Mighty One". The bike died in Chile, and they went on by truck, steamer, raft, horse and on foot — some 8,000 kilometres in about nine months, ending at a leper colony on the Amazon and in Caracas.
Guevara's diary of the trip, published decades later as The Motorcycle Diaries, records how poverty, exploited miners and the lepers they worked with changed him; within a few years he was "Che", a leader of the Cuban Revolution. The route follows the journey from both men's accounts as summarised by historians.
In December 1831 a 22-year-old Cambridge graduate with a passion for beetles and rocks sailed from Plymouth as an unpaid naturalist on HMS Beagle, a ten-gun survey brig. The voyage was meant to take two years and took five. Charles Darwin came home with crates of fossils, skins and notebooks — and with questions about the islands that would lead him, two decades later, to On the Origin of Species.
The route follows the ship around the world in order, using Darwin's own Journal of Researches for dates and details: the volcanic Cape Verde islands, the Brazilian forest, the fossil beds of Argentina, Tierra del Fuego, a great Chilean earthquake, the Galápagos, Cape Town and home to Falmouth.
