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Tourists Vs Locals: 20 Cities Based On Where People Take Photos

May 27, 2015 15 Comments

London tourists vs locals

London: Locals and Tourists by Eric Fischer

Tourists and locals experience cities in strikingly different ways. For example, in London most tourists will visit Buckingham Palace, the Houses of Parliament, St. Paul’s Cathedral, Oxford Street, etc. but will probably not end up visiting East Croydon, Hendon, Dagenham or any of the other parts of London outside of Zone 1.

Conversely, Londoners can go years without ever visiting the tourist traps of central London. To see just how different these two worlds are, have a look at the map of London above based on where people take photos.

The red bits indicate photos taken by tourists, while the blue bits indicate photos taken by locals and the yellow bits might be either.

So, for London you can clearly see the divide mentioned above and the map above only really shows zones 1 and 2. Go further out and you find even fewer places visited by tourists.

The map was created by Eric Fischer who’s also created similar maps for most of the world’s major cities. All of them are part of a project called Locals and Tourists, which in turn is based on a larger project called The Geotaggers’ World Atlas.

The data is from 2010-13, so may be slightly out of date, yet for most cities popular tourist destinations change little from year to year. Eric used MapBox and Twitter data from Gnip to create the maps.

Locals are those who tweeted from the same location for at least a month, while tourists where those who were considered local in another city but were tweeting in a different location.

In total 136 maps were created, here are 19 of the most interesting cities. You can view the full album here.

New York City tourists vs locals

New York

Washington tourists vs locals

Washington DC

Toronto tourists vs locals

Toronto

Tokyo tourists vs locals

Tokyo

Sydney tourists vs locals

Sydney

Stockholm tourists vs locals

Stockholm

San Francisco tourists vs locals

San Francisco

Rome tourists vs locals

Rome

Paris tourists  vs locals

Paris

Moscow tourists vs locals

Moscow

Manchester tourists vs locals

Manchester

Hong Kong tourists vs locals

Hong Kong

Edinburgh tourists vs locals

Edinburgh

Dublin tourists vs locals

Dublin

Copenhagen tourists vs locals

Copenhagen

Chicago tourists vs locals

Chicago

Berlin tourists vs locals

Berlin

Barcelona tourists vs locals

Barcelona

Amsterdam tourists vs locals

Amsterdam

Live in or visited one of the cities above? If so, do you think they’re accurate? Leave your comments below:

Filed Under: Other Tagged With: cities

Comments

  1. Rosley S.A. Lozano says

    August 21, 2015 at 5:10 pm

    y Buenos Aires, Argentina…???

    Reply
    • Papakudi Trosha says

      July 8, 2020 at 8:15 am

      Dijo “most interesting cities”…

      Reply
  2. Uncharted101 says

    November 28, 2015 at 8:40 pm

    That’s very interesting!

    Reply
  3. Владимир Загородских says

    May 27, 2017 at 11:35 am

    Why would you post a map with a color code and do not post any legend?
    What does red means? What does blue means? What does yellow means?

    Reply
    • Mirco Kentumi says

      July 24, 2017 at 3:46 pm

      it´s written in the discription above. “The red bits indicate photos taken by tourists, while the blue bits indicate photos taken by locals and the yellow bits might be either.”

      Readb4uWrite

      Reply
      • slg says

        October 1, 2020 at 5:04 pm

        😂

        Reply
    • Diego says

      August 24, 2018 at 7:53 pm

      Just read the text. Red means tourists

      Reply
  4. Caterina says

    April 3, 2019 at 11:28 pm

    I live in Barcelona, I would have put a little more yellow. The city is not so big, I often consider myself with tourists for the small streets of barcelona

    Reply
  5. lefty says

    April 28, 2019 at 5:06 am

    Haha, Rome’s got a little red rocket going on…

    Reply
  6. Patrick says

    June 17, 2019 at 7:47 pm

    How was it determined which photos were taken by locals, and which by tourists?

    Reply
    • none says

      June 21, 2019 at 1:45 am

      Read the article, they explain it.

      Reply
  7. Kenneth says

    June 18, 2019 at 1:25 am

    San Miguel de Allende? Center of culture in south America’s? 2 UNESCO sites, hello?

    Reply
  8. Dog of Tears says

    June 18, 2019 at 3:04 am

    Ha ha ha, Romans apparently have better things to do that take photos? Or, they all have untrackable burner phones…?

    Reply
  9. Fred says

    June 19, 2019 at 2:10 am

    Read the article and vou will know!

    Reply
  10. Olafur Tho says

    June 21, 2019 at 3:43 am

    How was the data collected?

    Reply

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