Catalog
9 routes found
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.
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.
Legend and archaeology meet at six places, from Agamemnon's citadel to Odysseus's island. Each stop is told from Homer's text, with what archaeologists have found kept apart and honestly labelled. The route follows the epic from the fleet at Aulis to the plain of the Scamander, then the Odyssey's road home via Pylos and Ithaca. Many identifications here are traditional or disputed, and the pins show it.
In the spring of 2004 Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman set out from London on motorcycles, heading east for New York with cinematographer Claudio von Planta. The ride ran from 14 April to 29 July and crossed twelve countries and 18,887 miles. The route follows the highlights: a church built of bones in the Czech Republic, a UNICEF project in Mongolia, the mud of the Zilov Gap, the Road of Bones to Magadan, Mount Rushmore and the ride into New York. Pins mark places and areas; the real line of travel ran between them.
In the autumn of 1600 two armies met at Sekigahara to decide who would hold power after Toyotomi Hideyoshi. One day in the fog gave Tokugawa Ieyasu a decisive victory and put him on the road to the shogunate. The route follows the campaign from the siege of Fushimi to the castles of Mino, the field of Sekigahara, the fall of Mitsunari's Sawayama and his burial in Kyoto, and ends at Edo Castle in 1603. Dates inside Japan's old calendar are labelled as such.
Washington Irving came to Granada in 1829 and ended up living in a palace of the Moorish kings. With a 17-year-old local guide named Mateo Ximenes at his elbow, he gathered the legends that became Tales of the Alhambra in 1832. This route follows the book through six places: the gate with the magic hand and key, Irving's rooms, the Hall of Ambassadors, the Court of Lions, the Generalife and the Tower of the Princesses. Several tales are legend as much as history, so the pins mark the places where Irving tells them.
In 1927 a former nobleman and a charming con man chase twelve dining chairs, one of them hiding family jewels, across the Soviet Union. Ilf and Petrov's comic novel follows them from a sleepy provincial town through Moscow and the Volga to the spa of Pyatigorsk, the Caucasus road and the Crimean coast. The route marks six stops; Stargorod and Vasyuki are invented, so their pins are only candidate stand-ins.
J. Robert Oppenheimer studies in Cambridge and Göttingen, builds a physics school at Berkeley, and is handed the one job nobody else wants: build the atomic bomb before the Nazis do. Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer (2023) follows him from the Cavendish Laboratory to a secret mesa in New Mexico, through the Trinity test and the political fallout that ends his career. This route follows the film's real places — Cambridge, Göttingen, LeConte Hall, Los Alamos, Trinity, the White House, the Institute for Advanced Study and the room where his security clearance was revoked. The film's own stand-ins, from Ghost Ranch to Kerckhoff Hall, Belen and Alhambra, are noted at each stop.
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.