The Battle of Britain was fought over south-east England in 1940, and its places are still there: Dover, RAF Biggin Hill, RAF Kenley, RAF Hornchurch, RAF Tangmere and the underground Uxbridge bunker.
The route follows the summer of 1940 from the Dunkirk headquarters at Dover Castle through the Kent and Sussex fighter fields, which were bombed in August, to the operations room where Churchill watched 15 September. Many sites are now museums, parks or airports.
The Battle of Trafalgar was fought off Cape Trafalgar in Spain, but Nelson's story runs from Portsmouth and HMS Victory to Gibraltar, Greenwich and St Paul's Cathedral in London.
This route follows Nelson's last journey in order: his farewell at Portsmouth in September 1805, the battle on 21 October, the tow to Gibraltar, his lying in state at Greenwich, the funeral at St Paul's, and Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square. The Portsmouth and Gibraltar pins are approximate.
In April 1947 the Norwegian Thor Heyerdahl and five companions pushed off from Peru on a raft of nine balsa logs, built in the style of old Spanish drawings of South American rafts. They meant to prove that ancient people could have drifted from South America to Polynesia. After 101 days and almost 7,000 kilometres on the open Pacific, they crashed onto a coral reef in the Tuamotus — and all six walked ashore.
The voyage became a bestselling book and an Oscar-winning documentary. Heyerdahl's theory, though, has not survived: archaeology, language and genetics show that Polynesians came from the west, from Island Southeast Asia, as master navigators. The route follows the raft from Callao to Tahiti.
Vermeer's Delft is a short walk through the Dutch city where Johannes Vermeer was baptized, painted and was buried. The route runs from the Nieuwe Kerk and the Vermeer Centre to the Paardenmarkt, the Vlamingstraat of The Little Street, a view of the skyline from the south, and the Oude Kerk.
The stops follow his life, from baptism in 1632 and the guild in 1653 to the 1654 explosion and his burial in 1675. The exact site of The Little Street is still debated.
Pearl Harbor and Midway tell the Pacific war's first six months: the Japanese attack on Battleship Row and the USS Arizona Memorial in Hawaii on 7 December 1941, then the naval battle at Midway Atoll in June 1942 that sank four Japanese carriers.
The route runs from Ford Island and Hickam Field to the codebreakers of Station HYPO, the fighting at Midway and the wreck of USS Yorktown on the seabed. Pearl Harbor stops can be visited; Midway Atoll is remote and the Yorktown wreck lies on the deep seabed.
The Mayflower's 1620 voyage runs from Scrooby in Nottinghamshire and Leiden in the Netherlands through Southampton, Dartmouth and Plymouth, England, to Provincetown and Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts.
The Pilgrims were English Separatists who left home for the Netherlands, then sailed for America in two ships. One, the Speedwell, kept leaking, so they crowded onto the Mayflower alone and finally sailed from Plymouth in September 1620, bound for Virginia.
This route follows them stop by stop, from the manor where their church met to the rock tradition names as their landing place. Plymouth Rock is a tradition, not a documented spot, and the stop says so.
Hegra (Mada'in Salih) in Saudi Arabia was the Nabataean kingdom's second capital after Petra in Jordan, and the rock-cut tombs of both cities come from the same 1st-century world.
This route follows the Nabataean caravan network from the Hegra tombs through Humeima and Little Petra to the Treasury and Monastery in Petra, and ends at Avdat on the Petra-Gaza road in the Negev.
Pompeii is the Roman city near Naples buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79, and this walking tour goes from its Amphitheatre and the Forum's Temple of Apollo to the House of the Faun, the Lupanar and the Garden of the Fugitives.
The route covers the town in its last years: a brawl in the arena in AD 59, the earthquake of 62, a rebuilt town, and the two days of the eruption itself. All six places can be visited today inside the Pompeii archaeological park.
La bola negra (The Black Ball), the 2026 film by Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, was shot in Granada, Sierra Nevada, Castil de Carrias, Sigüenza, Madrid, Athens and Comillas. It follows three timelines inspired by Federico García Lorca's unfinished play.
The route runs through the 1932, 1937 and 2017 storylines. The film does not name most of its settings, so most pins mark the listed filming locations.
The Wire was set and filmed in Baltimore: the Ritz Cabaret in Fells Point, East Baltimore's Middle East, Locust Point, Greenmount West and Camden Yards all appear on screen.
The HBO series by David Simon ran for five seasons from 2002 to 2008. This route follows five places from the first-season pilot to the school storyline of season 4. Most pins are neighborhoods, not single doors.
Heated Rivalry was filmed in Ontario: Hamilton (McMaster University, Dundurn Castle, FirstOntario Concert Hall), the Sleeman Centre in Guelph, and Muskoka, with Montreal landmarks in establishing shots.
The route follows the Crave series across seven places, from Shane and Ilya's first meeting on a Hamilton campus to the cottage finale. Most are visitable; the Muskoka pin is only an area.
Steel Magnolias (1989) was filmed in Natchitoches, Louisiana: the Steel Magnolia House on Jefferson Street, St. Augustine Church at Isle Brevelle, Front Street and Cane River Lake, American Cemetery and Beau Jardin.
Follow Shelby's wedding day, the Christmas festival, a funeral and an Easter egg hunt through the real streets of the town that played Chinquapin Parish. Pins mark the sites on the town's own film trail, and the private homes on that trail are left out.
Suleiman the Magnificent's campaigns run from Belgrade Fortress to Mohács, Vienna and Szigetvár, with the Süleymaniye Mosque in Istanbul as his monument.
The route follows the sultan through the sieges and battles of 1521–1566, from the fall of Belgrade and the battle of Mohács to the failed siege of Vienna in 1529 and his death during the siege of Szigetvár. The Mohács pin marks the town, not the battlefield itself.
Top Gun (1986) is set at Naval Air Station Miramar in San Diego and was filmed there, in Oceanside, at Kansas City Barbeque and at NAS Fallon in Nevada.
This route follows Maverick and Goose from the Miramar flight line to Charlie's house in Oceanside, the piano bar where they sing "Great Balls of Fire", the Nevada skies of the dogfights and North Island, where the sequel Top Gun: Maverick puts its school. Miramar, Fallon and North Island are active military bases.
Battlefield V sends you to Narvik in Norway, Tobruk in Libya, Kasserine Pass in Tunisia, Rjukan in Norway and the Nijmegen railway bridge in the Netherlands, all real places of the war.
The game's prologue jumps between fronts, and the "Nordlys" war story follows a Norwegian resistance fight over heavy water. This route lines up those settings with the real history of each place. Only the places named in the game's own plot summary are included.
Call of Duty: Black Ops sends CIA operative Alex Mason from the Bay of Pigs in Cuba to the Vorkuta gulag, Baikonur Cosmodrome, Huế in Vietnam and Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong.
Mason's story is told in flashbacks from an interrogation room, in order, from April 1961 to 1968. This route follows seven real places behind the campaign, and what happened at each one in real history. The game's levels are fiction, so most pins are approximate. Spoiler notice: the last stop reveals the campaign's twist.
The Roswell UFO incident of July 1947 began on a ranch near Corona, New Mexico, and ran through Roswell Army Air Field, Fort Worth and Wright Field in Ohio. The official explanation was a Project Mogul balloon.
This route follows the debris from the Alamogordo balloon launch to the Hangar 18 legend and the International UFO Museum in Roswell. Several stops are approximate, because the sources do not name exact spots.
Gone Girl is set in the made-up town of North Carthage, Missouri, but David Fincher shot it almost entirely in Cape Girardeau: The Bar on Themis Street, the Common Pleas Courthouse, the old federal building and the Bill Emerson Memorial Bridge over the Mississippi.
The route follows Nick Dunne's first days as the husband of a missing woman, from the bar to the press conference, the vigil, the police station and the bridge. One stop, the Drury Lodge, is marked approximately: it has closed and the pin sits on its street.
Jack the Ripper's Whitechapel murders of 1888 happened along a few Whitechapel and Spitalfields streets: Durward Street (then Buck's Row), Hanbury Street, Berner Street, Mitre Square and Miller's Court in Spitalfields. Five killings are generally attributed to the unidentified murderer.
This route follows the canonical victims in date order, with the Goulston Street graffito and the Ten Bells pub. Some sites are gone or renamed, and Miller's Court has no pin.
War Thunder's tank maps are based on real places: Stalingrad Tractor Plant, Bastogne, Hürtgen Forest, Cologne Cathedral, Berlin's Reichstag, Novorossiysk, Volokolamsk, Breslau (Wrocław), Darwin Hill in the Falklands and the Fulda Gap.
The developers say how close each map is to its original, from rebuilt photographs of the Stalingrad factory to a layout only inspired by the real ground. This route follows ten of them in the order of their history, with a short note on what happened at each real place.
Maps are classed here as exact only where the developers copy a real district; the rest are marked approximate.
Prince Shōtoku's temples in Japan run from Tachibana-dera and Asuka-dera in Asuka to Hōryū-ji and Chūgū-ji in Ikaruga, plus Shitennō-ji in Osaka.
The route follows the regent who promoted Buddhism, from the place said to be his birthplace to his palace site at Ikaruga and the embroidery made after his death in 622. Several dates rest on temple tradition rather than firm records, and the birthplace is marked as traditional.
The Battle of Iwo Jima was fought in February and March 1945 on a small volcanic island in Japan's Ogasawara group, from the black-sand landing beaches to the summit of Mount Suribachi. Its famous flag-raising photograph became the Marine Corps War Memorial in Arlington, Virginia.
This route follows the battle from the landing on 19 February, through the Suribachi flag-raising and the fight for the northern gorge, to the memorial in Arlington and the 1985 Reunion of Honor, where veterans of both sides met on the same beach. Iwo Jima itself is not open to ordinary visitors.
The Mongol invasions of Japan in 1274 and 1281 were fought at Tsushima, Iki Island and Hakata Bay in Fukuoka, and ended off Takashima, where a typhoon struck the fleet.
This route follows the two attempts in order: the 1274 landings on Tsushima and Iki, the Battle of Bun'ei at Hakata Bay and Hakozaki Shrine, then the stone wall built afterwards, the fleet anchored off Shikanoshima and the storm of 15 August 1281. Several spots are approximate, and the exact site of the Takashima episode is only the island's general area.
Hiroshige's One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, a series of 119 ukiyo-e prints, shows Edo, as Tokyo was then called: Nihonbashi, Kanda Shrine, Shinobazu Pond, Kameido Tenjin, Zōjō-ji and Sensō-ji in Asakusa.
This route follows seven of its views in print order, from Nihonbashi in snow to the gates of Sensō-ji, each tied to a place you can still visit. The Sumida River bridge of the famous sudden shower, and the Nihonbashi stop, have approximate pins.
