Fiction tourism: Culture and Travel Context

Fiction tourism aims at locations famous from literature, motion pictures, television series, video games, comic books and other media. Among featured destinations are film sets (hence the term setjetting), other shooting locations, TV or motion picture studios, theme parks, and museums.

Some of these have guided tours, theme parks, museums, and other organized hospitality for fiction tourists.

While series such as Breaking Bad and The Wire mostly take place within one city, others are spread out across a country, or even several continents.

Winnie the Pooh's Hundred Acre Wood in literary tourism is Ashdown Forest's Five Hundred Acre Wood near Hartfield, UK.

Greek and Roman mythology includes the Trojan War described in Homer's Iliad supposedly took place in ancient Troy, in what is now Turkey. Its ruins were discovered in the 19th century and have been partly excavated.

Harry Potter tourism (primarily United Kingdom) - locations where the film series was filmed.

Emigrants tour, following Vilhelm Moberg's book series about emigrants from Sweden to the United States.

Twilight, is a series of four vampire-themed fantasy romance novels by American author Stephenie Meyer, as well as three companion novels. The story in the novel was set primarily in the small town of Forks, Washington with real places in and around the town identified from the novel. Twilight the movie (2008), based on the novel, was filmed primarily in Portland, Oregon while its continual saga, Twilight: New Moon (2009) was filmed mainly in Vancouver, British Columbia, though the Volterra scenes were actually filmed in Montepulciano, Italy. Some of the scenes from both films also took place in other locations in Oregon, Washington and British Columbia.

Back to the Future tourism A 1985-1990 trilogy film, set in the fictional town of Hill Valley, California, which was filmed in several real places in the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area (Hill Valley in 1955, 1985 & 2015) and Sonora CA (Hill Valley in 1885).

Cars A 2006 animated film by Pixar, set in the fictional village of Radiator Springs, which is a composite of several real places along Route 66 and a couple of other places not on that highway, all in the United States of America.

This cultural overview is an excerpt of a community travel guide. Confirm current access, schedules and prices with the venue before planning a visit.

Source and licence

Text adapted from Fiction tourism by Wikivoyage contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0. Paragraphs have been selected and abridged, and formatting adjusted. This adapted text is shared under the same licence. Contributor history.