In 1832 the printmaker Hiroshige travelled the Tōkaidō, the road from Edo to Kyoto, and made it into The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō. This route follows seven of his prints, from the bridge where the road began to the bridge where it ended.
Each stop pairs a print with what is there today: a rebuilt checkpoint, a long river bridge, a shrine, a preserved post town. Scholars debate whether Hiroshige saw every station himself, so the pins mark the places, not his exact viewpoints.
Two Mamoru Hosoda films are built on places from his own life. Summer Wars is set in Ueda, Nagano; Wolf Children draws on Kamiichi, Hosoda's home town in Toyama, and the hills around it.
The route visits Ueda Station and the castle gate seen in Summer Wars, then Hitotsubashi University, a farmhouse in Kamiichi and a school in Namerikawa from Wolf Children. The Kamiichi pin marks the district, not the house.
Yurucamp (ゆるキャン△) sends a handful of schoolgirls camping around Mount Fuji, and most of what they visit is real.
This route follows eight places from the series, from Lake Motosu to the Mizugaki area. Campsite and shop names are often changed on screen, so each stop names the real place it is modelled on.
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.
In 1819 Bolívar led an army from the flooded Llanos over the Páramo de Pisba, a pass 3,960 metres high that had been left unguarded because it seemed impassable. Weeks later he won at Boyacá and entered Santa Fe.
The route follows him from the Congress of Angostura through the freezing crossing, the standoff at Gámeza and the lancers' charge at Vargas Swamp to the Boyacá bridge and the capital. Several stops are approximate, since the sources name regions rather than exact spots.
In August 1492 three small ships slipped down the Río Tinto from Palos with a plan to reach the Indies by sailing west. By mid-March 1493 Columbus was back in Palos without his flagship, which had been wrecked off Hispaniola, but with captives, samples of gold and plants unknown in Europe.
The route follows the voyage in order: the friary where the plan found friends, a stopover in the Canaries, the first landfall in the Bahamas, the wrecked flagship and the fort of La Navidad, a storm-driven stop in Lisbon, the return to Palos and the report to the monarchs in Barcelona. The landfall island and the fort site are both debated, and the pins say so.
Pixar's Coco follows the boy Miguel from his shoemaking family's town of Santa Cecilia into the Land of the Dead on the Day of the Dead. Neither world exists on a map, but the filmmakers drew on real Mexican villages, families and festivals, and Mexican guides have since linked more places to it.
This route follows five of those places in the order the story needs them. Almost every link is an inspiration, not a filming location, and the pins say so.
The legend of Kitezh, the Russian Atlantis, says the city sank into Lake Svetloyar rather than fall to the Mongols. The route also visits Gorodets on the Volga, said to be Little Kitezh, and Kideksha near Suzdal, the name's folk origin. On calm days, they say, its bells can still be heard.
The route follows the story from the folk etymology of the name, through the town said to be Little Kitezh and the forests of the Kerzhenets, to the lake itself and the St Petersburg stage where the opera first sounded. Kitezh is a legend: the places are traditional identifications, not proof.
The novel was banned in the Soviet Union, so David Lean could not shoot his epic there. Instead he built Moscow in a field outside Madrid, turned the pine woods of Soria into the Urals and sent a second crew to the snows of Finland.
The route follows the story in order, from the dam of the frame story to the ice palace at Varykino, and shows where each scene was really filmed. Most pins mark general areas, not exact camera spots.
Vasily Livanov and Vitaly Solomin's Soviet Holmes and Watson were made when filming abroad was impossible, so a Riga lane became Baker Street, a Petersburg station became Victoria and a waterfall in Abkhazia became the Reichenbach Falls.
The route follows the Lenfilm television films of 1979 to 1986 from the Riga street with the screen 221b to Peterhof, Saint Petersburg, the Gega Waterfall and Tallinn.
In January 1959 a group of ten experienced hikers from the Ural Polytechnical Institute set out on a ski trek into the northern Urals. Nine never came back: they cut their way out of their tent on a mountain slope one February night and died in the snow, and the cause is still discussed.
This route follows the group from the institute in Sverdlovsk by train and lorry to the last village, then up to the mountain and the pass now named after them, and ends with the survivor's memorial. It sticks to the record; the explanations are left to the reader. The exact tent site is approximate.
In the spring of 1890 the playwright and doctor Anton Chekhov left Moscow, crossed Siberia and sailed to Sakhalin, a convict island north of Japan, to count its inhabitants one by one. He kept the plan secret until January, travelled 82 days across Siberia, and came home months later by sea.
The route follows his way from his Moscow house through Tomsk, Irkutsk and the Amur to the penal posts of Sakhalin and back to Vladivostok. Several pins mark whole towns, because Chekhov's lodgings are not recorded.
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.
In Gogol's Petersburg nothing is what it seems: the grandest street is a liar, a nose walks about in a state councillor's uniform, and a dead clerk tears coats off passers-by. Three of his stories share one city, and most of their stops can still be walked.
The route runs along Nevsky Prospekt and its neighbouring streets, from the painter's and the lieutenant's chases in Nevsky Prospekt, through The Nose's barber, cathedral, bridge, garden and shop, to the Kalinkin Bridge where the ghost of The Overcoat is said to prowl. A few stops are approximate, since Gogol seldom gives house numbers.
It rains on Tokyo all summer, and runaway Hodaka Morishima meets Hina Amano, a girl who can pray the sky clear. Makoto Shinkai's film follows them through real corners of the city: a McDonald's in Kabukichō, a rooftop shrine on an abandoned building, a hillside flat, a fireworks festival and a jewellery shop at Shinjuku Station.
Seven stops run from Hodaka's home island to Lumine Shinjuku. Several pins mark a district rather than a spot, and Yoyogi Kaikan was demolished in 2019–20, so that stop is a memory.
Slam Dunk follows Hanamichi Sakuragi, who joins the Shohoku High School basketball team to impress a girl and turns out to be a natural. Its Shōnan coast is real: a railway crossing from the anime opening, a seaside station renamed for a rival school, and the beach where the film ends.
The route runs from the Kamakurakōkōmae crossing to Kugenuma Beach in Fujisawa, with the model for Ryonan High School and the Hiratsuka gymnasium on the way.
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.
The Old English poem Beowulf is set in Denmark and Sweden, and a surprising number of its kings, battles and halls turn up in Scandinavian sources and in the ground. Follow the hero from his Geatish homeland to Hrothgar's hall, then to the raid in Frisia, the royal mounds at Uppsala, and the English ship burial and library shelf where the poem survived.
Most identifications here are traditional rather than proven, and the pins say so.
A Cornish knight fetches an Irish princess for his uncle the king, and a love potion on the ship ruins everything. Tristan and Iseult is a medieval legend told in many versions since the 12th century, and every retelling sets it on a slightly different map.
This route follows the lovers from Tristan's drowned homeland to Dublin, Cornwall and Brittany, ending on the island that carries his name. Almost every site is a tradition rather than a fact, so each pin says how sure it is.
The Nibelungenlied on the map: Xanten, Siegfried's home; Worms, where two queens quarrel at the cathedral door; and the Danube towns of Tulln and Pöchlarn. It tells of a dragon-slayer's hoard, a murder at a spring and a revenge thirteen years in the making.
This route follows the story from Siegfried's home in Xanten to Worms, to the Odenwald, and then east along the Danube to Tulln and Pöchlarn. Several sites are local traditions, not proof; the poem itself is vague about most places.
Heracles' first six labours are set across the Peloponnese: Tiryns, Nemea and its lion, Lerna and its Hydra, Ceryneia, Erymanthos and Elis. He must kill a lion no arrow pierces and a many-headed Hydra, and clean a stable of thirty years' dung.
This route follows the first six labours in their traditional order, from the fortress of Tiryns through Nemea, Lerna, Ceryneia, Erymanthos and Elis to Lake Stymphalia. The myth rarely names an exact spot, so most pins mark the place the tale is tied to, not a cave or a lair.
A baker's oven in Pudding Lane, a gale from the east and a city of timber and pitch: in four days in September 1666 the fire destroyed medieval London, including Old St Paul's. Samuel Pepys watched it from the Tower, from the river and from a church tower, and wrote it all down.
The route follows the fire from its first spark on Sunday morning to its end on Wednesday, then to the Monument and the Golden Boy that remember it. Where the sources give only an area, such as the refugee camps at Moorfields, the pin marks it loosely.
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.
For eighteen months in 1860 and 1861, relays of light riders on fast horses carried letters 1,900 miles from the Missouri River to California. It took about ten days, was never profitable, and was made obsolete by the telegraph within a year and a half — yet it became one of the great legends of the Old West.
The route follows the mail west through eight places: the stables where the first rider set out, a surviving station in Kansas, Fort Kearny, Julesburg, the plains where Mark Twain saw a rider flash past his stagecoach, Utah, the Nevada desert and the terminus in Sacramento. Where legend (Buffalo Bill, Twain's eight days) outruns the record, the text says so.
