Catalog
Gran Turismo, Forza and Assetto Corsa race on real circuits: the Nürburgring Nordschleife, Spa-Francorchamps, Monza, Le Mans, Suzuka and Laguna Seca. This route lists six tracks you can drive in racing games, with what each game does with them and the real circuit behind the screen. Game appearances differ by title and year.
The fictional seaside village of Gongjin in Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha is Pohang, South Korea: Cheongha Market, the village of Cheongjin-ri, Sabang Memorial Park and the Seokbyeong-ri lighthouse. Seoul dentist Yoon Hye-jin opens a clinic in Gongjin and falls for Chief Hong. The route follows the market, clinic, boat and lighthouse, then makes one side trip to a museum in Yangju. Two pins mark villages, not exact buildings.
Netflix's Lupin is set across Paris, from the Louvre and the Pont des Arts to Place Vendôme, with a Normandy detour to the cliffs of Étretat. Assane Diop, a modern gentleman thief inspired by Arsène Lupin, uses real landmarks as his stage. The route follows six filming locations: the Louvre, the Musée Nissim de Camondo, the Pont des Arts, the Luxembourg Gardens, Étretat and Place Vendôme. Exact spots in Étretat are not named by the sources.
Inspector Montalbano is set in the fictional town of Vigàta, based on Camilleri's native Porto Empedocle, but the series is largely filmed in the province of Ragusa: Scicli's town hall, the beach at Punta Secca, the ruined Fornace Penna and Ragusa Ibla. This route follows six filming locations, from Montalbano's offices and home to Donnafugata Castle and the Guerrieri Viaduct in Modica. Camilleri set his books in a fictionalised province of Agrigento, so these are screen stand-ins, not the novels' own places.
Letters to Juliet (2010) is set in Verona and the countryside around Siena: Juliet's House and the Ponte Scaligero in Verona, Villa Arvedi near Grezzana, and Piazza del Campo in Siena. Sophie, an American on a pre-honeymoon, answers a 1957 letter left for Juliet and sets off to find Claire's lost love. This route follows the film from the Verona courtyard where the letters are left to the squares of Siena, using the real filming locations. Some scenes were built for the film, such as the wall of letters.
Merchant Ivory's 1985 film of Forster's novel is set in Florence and Surrey and was shot in the Piazza della Signoria, around Fiesole, at Emmetts Garden in Kent and at 18 Stafford Terrace in London. The route follows Lucy Honeychurch from a Florentine pensione without a view, through a stabbing and a kiss in a poppy field, to an engagement in England that cannot last. The film was shot in ten weeks: four in Italy and six in England.
Danny Boyle's The Beach (2000) follows a young backpacker from Bangkok's Khao San Road to a secret island beach, shot at Maya Bay on Ko Phi Phi Le, from Alex Garland's 1996 novel. The route runs from Khao San Road through Ko Samui, a Khao Yai waterfall and Maya Bay to Ko Pha Ngan. Several stops are stand-ins: hotel interiors were shot in Phuket, the waterfall jump in Khao Yai, and the island itself is invented.
Spectre opens in Mexico City, where Bond chases an assassin through the Gran Hotel and the Zócalo, then moves to Rome, Altaussee, Tangier and the desert near Erfoud. It was filmed at many of those places, including the Ponte Sisto bridge and the Gara Medouar crater. The route follows Bond from the Day of the Dead parade to a car chase on the Tiber, a dying Mr White in the Austrian Alps and Spectre's base in the Sahara. It ends on Westminster Bridge in London. Tangier's hotel L'Américain exists only in the story.
Conan the Barbarian was filmed across Spain: the Cimmerian village at Valsaín, the Wheel of Pain near Solosancho, the witch's rocks at the Ciudad Encantada, and the deserts, dunes and salt marshes of Almería. The Hyborian Age is invented; every stop here is a real place. The route follows the film from the raid on Conan's village to the Mountain of Power, and ends at Shepperton Studios in England, where an older King Conan speaks the closing lines.
GTA: San Andreas turns California and Nevada into one state: Los Santos is Los Angeles, San Fierro is San Francisco, Las Venturas is Las Vegas. The 2004 game follows CJ from Grove Street to stand-ins for the Golden Gate, Hoover Dam and the Las Vegas Strip. This route visits seven real stand-ins behind the game, from Compton and the Hollywood Sign to Mount Diablo, the Golden Gate Bridge, Area 51, Hoover Dam and the Las Vegas Strip. Every pin marks the real place, and each stop names the in-game location it doubles for. Expect city traffic, desert heat and long drives between stops.
Paranormasight is set in 1980s Sumida, Tokyo, and built on the Honjo Seven Mysteries, Edo-era ghost stories tied to real spots such as Kinshibori Park, the Former Yasuda Garden and Ryogoku. The 2023 Square Enix game turns the legends into cursed beads passed to its characters. The route follows its opening scene and the legends' old sites. The exact sites of the old stories are uncertain, so several pins mark the neighbourhood.
Goblin was filmed in Seoul, on the Jumunjin breakwater on Korea's east coast and in Quebec City, where the red door in Petit-Champlain, the Château Frontenac and the Tourny fountain appear. A Goryeo general killed by his king returns as an immortal goblin and spends 939 years looking for the bride who can pull the sword from his chest. The route follows the story from the palace set where his Goryeo past was filmed to his house in Seoul, the Gangneung breakwater where they first meet, and the old streets of Quebec City beyond a red door. It ends at the park that stands in for the Yoo family cemetery.
Every Far Cry game drops you into a country that does not exist, and almost every one was built from a real place. The developers camped on the savanna, sent a team to Nepal, spent two weeks in Montana and a month in Cuba. This route follows the series in release order, one stop per game. Pins mark whole countries or regions, not scenes: they show where each fictional setting came from, and one entry has no sourced real model.
In 1973 Paul Theroux set out from London Victoria on a four-month railway loop through Europe, the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia, then came back on the Trans-Siberian Railway. His travelogue, published in 1975, became a classic of the genre. This route follows episodes the book's reviewers single out, from the Direct-Orient Express to Istanbul, Calcutta, Burma, Vietnam and Tokyo. The book's own text could not be checked, so some pins mark a city's station rather than a scene, and some places are not safe to visit now.
Attack on Titan is set behind three great walls, but its author comes from a real mountain town in Ōita, Japan. Hajime Isayama grew up in Ōyama, now part of Hita, and used the landscape around it as the model for his world. The route follows the town from his birthplace to the 2014 event that made him Tourism Ambassador, and then to the statues of Eren, Mikasa, Armin and Levi that Hita set up in 2020 and 2021. The sources do not tie the series to any single real wall, so the stops mark the town's own tributes.
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon moves from the Karamay Ghost City in Xinjiang to Hongcun and Nanping in Anhui and the Anji bamboo forest, with Mount Cangyan playing Wudang. Ang Lee's wuxia romance follows a retired swordsman, a runaway governor's daughter and a stolen sword. 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.
El Dorado is Lake Guatavita, 57 km northeast of Bogotá, where legend sets the gilded zipa's raft, with stops at Funza, Sogamoso and the Gold Museum. The ritual was written down generations after the conquest; the gold and the draining are history. The route follows both threads, and each stop says which is which: Quesada's march in 1537, the lake itself, the drainage, a rival lake, the cave where a raft turned up in 1969 and the Bogotá museum that keeps it.
Pedro Almodóvar has shot the majority of his films in Madrid, and Madrid's tourism office lists the exact streets, bars and squares where his scenes happened. The route follows eight filming spots in order of release, from the El Rastro bar of Labyrinth of Passion in 1982 to the Comendadoras square of Parallel Mothers in 2021, with one detour to Almagro in La Mancha for Volver.
In June 1995 Cheryl Strayed, 26 and with no hiking experience, set out alone to walk 1,100 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail. Her memoir Wild reached No. 1 on the New York Times Best Seller list, and Reese Witherspoon played her in the 2014 film. This route follows the hike north from the Mojave Desert to the Columbia River, using the memoir's outline and the film's best-known scenes. The film compresses and dramatises, so stops drawn from it say so, and pins mark areas rather than campsites.
Rachel Chu, a Chinese American economics professor, flies to Singapore with her boyfriend Nick for his best friend's wedding and learns that Nick's family is among the richest in the country. Jon M. Chu's 2018 film follows her from the airport to a mahjong table where she faces down his mother. This route visits nine places from the film, in story order. Several of the story's places were filmed in Malaysia instead of Singapore: the Young family estate in Kuala Lumpur, the island parties on Langkawi and the mahjong parlor in Penang.
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.
On the evening of 2 October 1872, the punctual and unflappable Phileas Fogg bets his fellow members of the Reform Club £20,000 — half his fortune — that he can go around the world in eighty days, and leaves that same night with his new French valet, Passepartout. On his heels comes Detective Fix, convinced that Fogg is a bank robber on the run. Jules Verne's novel appeared in 1872, when the opening of the Suez Canal and new railways across India and America had made such a race against the timetable just about possible. The route follows the journey eastward in the novel's own dates, from Pall Mall back to Pall Mall.