Rabo de Peixe, the Netflix series known as Turn of the Tide, is set in a fishing village on São Miguel in the Azores, but it was shot in several places across the island: Porto Formoso, the Arnel lighthouse, Furnas and the ruined Monte Palace Hotel above Sete Cidades.
The story is loosely based on a real 2001 cocaine landing. The route follows the series from the village to its final scenes, with a note on what you can visit today.
Minamoto no Yoshitsune's life runs from Kurama temple in Kyoto through the Genpei War battles of Ichi-no-Tani in Kobe, Yashima in Takamatsu and Dan-no-ura near Shimonoseki, to his last stand at Takadachi in Hiraizumi.
The route follows the famous general from a boy among the monks to a hero turned out by his own brother at Koshigoe. Battle sites are approximate; the temple, the Koshigoe temple and the Hiraizumi chapel can be visited.
Poldark's Cornwall is real Cornwall: the 2015 adaptation filmed Nampara, Wheal Leisure and Truro at St Agnes Head, Botallack and Charlestown, with Trenwith played by Chavenage House near Tetbury.
This route follows eight locations from the 2015 adaptation, from the cliffs above St Agnes and the engine houses of Botallack to the beaches of the Lizard and the north coast. Most are open to the public, but they are working landscapes and nature reserves as much as film sets, so expect footpaths, tides and weather.
Santa Carla, the vampire town of The Lost Boys (1987), is Santa Cruz, California: the Beach Boardwalk, the Giant Dipper coaster, the Municipal Wharf and the Pogonip clubhouse were all filmed in June 1986. The film's cave and bridge were shot far to the south, in Los Angeles County.
The route follows Michael and Sam Emerson from the funfair to Max's video store, the railway trestle, the cave under the hotel and Grandpa's house, and marks which stops you can still visit.
The Goonies is set in Astoria, Oregon, where the Walsh family's foreclosure sends Mikey and Data into the attic and out to Cannon Beach. The film used the old Clatsop County Jail, the Flavel House, the real house at 368 38th Street, Ecola State Park, Haystack Rock and Goat Rock Beach in California.
This route follows the Goonies from the jailbreak through the Goon Docks, the museum, the bike ride to Ecola, the Fratelli hideout and the underground ship to the final beach.
Jin Yong, the grand master of martial arts fiction, was born in Haining, Zhejiang. This route follows him out of the family house, to the tide he loved, and then across China to the places his heroes fight: a lake in Jiaxing, an island off Zhoushan, the mountains and monastery of Hua, Shaolin and Wudang, and a cell under Hangzhou's West Lake.
The real landmarks are documented; the sects, manors and duels set at them are fiction. Each stop says which is which, and where a pin marks the real place, it is not a scene.
Water Margin follows 108 spirits freed from a sealed hall on Longhu Mountain as they become the outlaws of Liangshan Marsh, with stops at Mount Wutai and the Xunyang Tower. A real Song Jiang appears in the Song History; the marsh silted up centuries ago.
Each stop is a scene from the novel, set beside what is documented: a real Song Jiang appears in the Song History, and the real Liangshan Marsh silted up centuries ago. Places tied to the story only by later tradition are marked.
Between 1180 and 1185 Japan's two great warrior clans, Taira and Minamoto, fought over the realm, and the war ended with a child emperor, a fleet and the tide at Dan-no-ura. It was the war that led to the first shogun.
This route visits seven battlefield sites in date order, from the bridge at Uji to the Kanmon Straits. Documented events are kept apart from the Heike Monogatari's legends, which the text attributes to the tale. Most battle areas are approximate.
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.
On the night of 18 April 1775 Paul Revere was rowed across the Charles River, got a horse in Charlestown and rode west to warn John Hancock and Samuel Adams that British troops were on the move. He left three accounts of that night, and this route follows them rather than the poem.
It runs through nine places, from his house in North Square and the lanterns at Old North Church to the pasture in Lincoln where a British patrol stopped him, and on to Concord, which Samuel Prescott reached without him. Where a spot is only traditional, the stop says so.
Battlefield 1 sends its soldiers across the Western Front, the Italian Front, Gallipoli and Arabia. This route follows the War Stories and multiplayer maps that go with them, from the Suez Canal in 1915 to Monte Grappa in October 1918.
Stops run in the order of the real battles, not the game's menu. The maps are the game's own reconstructions, so each pin marks the real ground behind a level, and one stop is a village the game invented.
HBO's Game of Thrones prequel was filmed primarily in the United Kingdom, and its Velaryon world is Cornish: the island seat of Driftmark is a tidal island, and the Stepstones war camp is a cove on the Lizard peninsula. For the capital and the free city of Pentos, the crew went to western and southern Spain.
The route follows the story from the Stepstones war (season 1, episode 3) through the Driftmark episodes to King's Landing in season 2. Sources do not name the exact streets used in Cáceres, so that pin marks the old town.
In November 1274 a Mongol and Korean fleet landed on Tsushima, a mountainous Japanese island halfway to Korea, and overwhelmed its few defenders. Sucker Punch's 2020 game drops a fictional samurai, Jin Sakai, into that invasion: he survives the massacre on the beach and turns into "the Ghost", a guerrilla who breaks the samurai code to drive the invaders out.
The designers visited Tsushima twice but did not copy it one to one. This route visits the real places behind the game's opening battle, its castle and its shrines, most of them featured in the island's own guide for players. Jin, his clan and his battles are fiction; the landing, the fortress and the mountains are not.
John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps sends Richard Hannay from a flat behind London's Langham Place onto the 7.10 from St Pancras and north to Galloway's Cairnsmore of Fleet and the spa town of Moffat, while a German spy ring hunts him. Hannay has three weeks to survive before he can warn the government. The title comes from a real stair in Broadstairs: 78 steps, not 39.
This is John Buchan's 1915 novel, not Hitchcock's very different film. London, St Pancras, Cairnsmore of Fleet and Moffat are named in the book; Hannay's hiding places on the moors and the Kent resort of Bradgate are not real, but the steps that gave the book its title are.
