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The data is from 2010-13, so may be slightly out of date, yet for most cities popular tourist destinations change little from year to year.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.
Live in or visited one of the cities above? If so, do you think they’re accurate? Leave your comments below:
Rosley S.A. Lozano says
y Buenos Aires, Argentina…???
Uncharted101 says
That’s very interesting!
Владимир Загородских says
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?
Mirco Kentumi says
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
Diego says
Just read the text. Red means tourists
Caterina says
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
lefty says
Haha, Rome’s got a little red rocket going on…
Patrick says
How was it determined which photos were taken by locals, and which by tourists?
none says
Read the article, they explain it.
Kenneth says
San Miguel de Allende? Center of culture in south America’s? 2 UNESCO sites, hello?
Dog of Tears says
Ha ha ha, Romans apparently have better things to do that take photos? Or, they all have untrackable burner phones…?
Fred says
Read the article and vou will know!
Olafur Tho says
How was the data collected?