Carlos Castaneda: From Cajamarca to Don Juan's Mexico

His birth record gives his name as Carlos César Salvador Arana, born on Christmas Day 1925 in Cajamarca, a town in northern Peru. His father was a watch repairman and goldsmith. Castaneda later told grander versions: a noble family, an academic father, an Argentine boarding school, and other birthplaces and years. In 1973 Time magazine dug up the immigration records. They confirm Cajamarca and 1925, which is the first sign that his biography needs the same caution as his books.

Location precision: The birth record names the town, not a house; the pin marks the centre of Cajamarca.

Time traced his schooling to Lima's Colegio Nacional de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe. It is a public school founded in 1840, and it has stood on Alfonso Ugarte Avenue since 1909. He later told people he had studied sculpture at an art school in Milan, but he never did. He did spend time at an art school here in Lima. In 1951 he left Peru for the United States, where he became a citizen six years later.

Location precision: OpenStreetMap has no point for the school building; the pin marks Alfonso Ugarte Avenue, where it stands.

Castaneda wrote his first three books as an anthropology student at UCLA. His last book recalls walking out of Haines Hall, then home of the anthropology department, on the way to lunch. The first book opens with a UCLA student heading to the Southwest in the summer of 1960 to collect plant lore. The Teachings of Don Juan was his master's thesis. UCLA later gave him his bachelor's and doctoral degrees for the work the books describe. Haines Hall, first built as the Chemistry Building, is one of the campus's four original buildings from 1929.

It all begins with waiting for a bus. In the 1968 book a student and his guide are waiting for a Greyhound in an unnamed border town. The guide points out a white-haired old Indian who knows a great deal about plants, peyote above all, and the old man says his name is Juan. Time placed the meeting in an Arizona bus depot near the Mexican border. Only the last book, published in 1998, names the depot in Nogales, Arizona, and calls the guide Bill.

Location precision: The first book names no town, and the depot's 1960 address is unknown; the pin marks downtown Nogales, Arizona.

The books make don Juan a Yaqui from Sonora and keep coming back to his house there. In The Active Side of Infinity a local contact has Carlos drive to Pótam, one of the traditional Yaqui towns on the Yaqui River. There they visit Lucas Coronado, a sorcerer known for the masks he carved for the Lenten festivities. Pótam is real: it is one of eight mission villages where Jesuit missionaries settled the Yaqui in the early 1600s. Critics point out that the books contradict what is known of Yaqui culture.

Location precision: Only the last book names the town, and no house is identified; the pin marks Pótam.

The title story of Journey to Ixtlan, published in 1972, belongs to don Genaro, don Juan's friend and fellow sorcerer. After an encounter with power he sets out to walk home to Ixtlan, but the only people he meets on the road are what he calls phantom travelers. He never gets there. Don Juan tells Carlos that everyone has a lost home like that, and that for Carlos it will be Los Angeles. The book never puts Genaro's Ixtlan on a map, so this stop has no pin either.

Location precision: The book gives no location for Genaro's Ixtlan, so the stop is left unpinned.

Mexico City is where the books dress don Juan in a suit. In Tales of Power (1974) Carlos runs into him near the Paseo de la Reforma, they talk on a bench in the Alameda, and a shove through an airline office door lands Carlos somewhere else entirely. In The Art of Dreaming (1993) don Juan lodges at the Hotel del Prado on the Alameda, lunches at Café Tacuba and dines at Sanborns in the House of Tiles, an 18th-century palace faced with Talavera tiles. The Hotel Regis across the street, where that night's dreaming happens, collapsed in the 1985 earthquake, and the del Prado was demolished the same year.

Visitor guidance: The Alameda is a free public park; Sanborns still serves meals in the House of Tiles on Madero Street.

The saga's first ending comes in 1973, at what the books call the final meeting. The Second Ring of Power opens by recalling it: a flat, barren mountaintop on the western slopes of the Sierra Madre in central Mexico. After farewells with don Juan and don Genaro, Carlos and a fellow apprentice, Pablito, jump together into an abyss. The book treats the jump as a passage back and forth between two realms of perception, not as a death. The mountain is never named.

Location precision: The book names only the western slopes of the Sierra Madre, so the stop is left unpinned.

Oaxaca keeps coming back in the later books. In The Eagle's Gift Carlos and la Gorda, one of don Juan's apprentices, drive into the city one evening and find the empty bench on the central plaza where don Juan and don Genaro used to sit. There la Gorda realizes that a memory she took for a dream is real. She also confesses that at Monte Albán, ruins don Juan told her to stay away from, she once dug up a smooth stone with a hole drilled through it that made her hand hot. The Zócalo was laid out in 1529; Monte Albán was founded around 500 BC.

Location precision: The book says only 'the plaza' and doesn't say which bench; the pin marks Oaxaca's Zócalo. Monte Albán is a separate site on a ridge above the valley.

Visitor guidance: The Zócalo is a shaded square ringed by arcades; Monte Albán is a short drive away, above the Valley of Oaxaca.

In The Eagle's Gift Carlos arrives fresh from the ruins of Tula, Hidalgo, still struck by four colossal stone figures standing on top of a pyramid. He went there partly because the apprentices had told him something don Juan never had: that don Juan considered himself a cultural descendant of the Toltecs. Tula was the Toltec capital. Its four warrior columns, each more than 4.6 metres tall, still stand on top of Pyramid B, the Temple of Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli.

Visitor guidance: An archaeological zone at Tula de Allende; the Atlanteans stand on top of Pyramid B.

Castaneda's last book picks up after the leap: Carlos comes to in his office-apartment at Westwood and Wilshire, decides he must be a ghost, and walks a block to Ship's for breakfast. The coffee shop at Wilshire and Glendon was real; it closed in 1984 and was demolished. From 1973 Castaneda owned a compound on nearby Pandora Avenue, shared with an inner circle of women he called his "witches", who ran Cleargreen, selling his teachings through workshops. He died in Los Angeles on 27 April 1998, aged 72, of liver cancer, and his ashes were sent to Mexico. By then his books had sold more than eight million copies.

Location precision: The pin marks the site of Ship's at 10877 Wilshire; the Pandora Avenue compound nearby is a private home.

The story ends on a sombre note. Around the time of Castaneda's death, five women from his inner circle went missing. Weeks later Patricia Partin's red Ford Escort was found abandoned in Death Valley. In 2003 two hikers found a skeleton in the Panamint Dunes area, and in 2006 DNA tests identified it as Partin's. The cause of death was ruled undetermined. The other four women have never been heard from. The dunes lie at the remote northern end of Panamint Valley, inside Death Valley National Park.

Location precision: Reports name the dunes area, not the exact spot; the pin marks the Panamint Dunes.