Today is the day. Today ‘The Odyssey’ premieres. Three years have passed since Nolan’s last breakthrough in traditional cinema, ‘Oppenheimer’. And this Homeric feat aspires to nothing less. The new pretty girl from Universal Pictures that uses the most advanced IMAX technology is already placed in the highest position in the career of a director, Christopher Nolan, author of gems such as ‘The Dark Knight’, ‘Memento’ or ‘Interstellar’, who has not surrendered to anything other than his personal vision.
Because yes, to the complaints of resorting to white marble instead of classical polychrome, to that mania of making actors very sexy with studded leather and stylized helmets, comes the question of historical reconstruction. Can? Maybe. We have made our attempt and we have something more historically accurate: a map. But not just any one: a dynamic tour that includes the entire journey point by point and draws connections between facts and fictions.
Let’s travel together through the great epic of the Mediterranean. We leave the editorial debate to authorities such as Vinzenz Brinkmann, Barry Strauss or Robin Lane Fox.
When Homer wrote the Odyssey, probably between the years 750 and 700 BC. c.the map of the Mediterranean ended long before where Europe ends today. Beyond were the monsters, capricious gods, impossible islands and an ocean that no one dared to describe. Two thousand seven hundred years later, the big question remains the same: where did Odysseus really travel? And, why not ask, did it ever reach what is now Spain?
The short answer is no. The long one is much more fascinating. We have the historiography of Strabo, Herodotus, Avienus, Pindar, Apollonius of Rhodes, Diodorus Siculus and Pliny the Elder. Their references explain why Gibraltar, Tartessos and southern Hispania ended up being incorporated into the Homeric imagination without Homer having ever mentioned them. That part is often overlooked but we want to review it thoroughly. Let’s travel to the key moment.
It all started with a war that (maybe) did happen
The Odyssey It starts when the Trojan War has already ended. Ulysses—or Odysseus, as you wish—tries to return to Ithaca after ten years of combat. This is the more or less approximate historical chronology so that we can situate ourselves:
- c. 1250-1180 BC. C.: possible Trojan War.
- c. 1170 BC C.: journey of Odysseus.
- c. 750-700 BC C.: Homer writes the Odyssey.
- 7th-6th centuries BC. C.: the Greeks arrive in Iberia.
Today’s archaeologists rely on a real conflict. Excavations at Hisarlik in Türkiye have shown that Troy existed and that one of its cities It was destroyed around 1200-1180 BC. c., right at the end of the Bronze Age. It is difficult to know if Achilles, Hector or Ulysses existed, but the historical scenario is compatible with a great war between Aegean kingdoms.
If that war inspired the poem, Ulysses’ journey would have occurred around 1170 BC. C. However, the story we know was written about four centuries later, when many of those memories had already been mixed with legends.
Ten years wandering around the Mediterranean
As any reader remembers, Ulysses’ journey begins in the ruins of Troy: “Talk to me, Muse, about that man of multiform genius who, after destroying the sacred city of Troy,” declaims the first verse of Canto I. Violently destroyed around 1180 BC. C., Troy VIIa It is the main candidate for having inspired the conflict, according to the German Heinrich Schliemann, who decided to search for the real place in 1871. From there he sails to Ismaro, the city of the cicones, on the present-day coast of Thrace.
Then the lotus eaters arrive, whose fruit makes one forget the desire to return home; the island of the cyclops Polyphemus; the kingdom of Aeolus, guardian of the winds; the laestrygonians, anthropophagous giants; the island of Circe; the descent into Hades; the passage alongside the sirens; the strait guarded by Scylla and Charybdis; the island of the Sun, where his men sacrifice the sacred cattle of Helios; the island of Calypso, where he remains captive for seven years; the land of the Phaeacians and, finally, Ithaca, the small island in the Ionian Sea that some authors insist on not pairing with the Ithaca of the work.
Perhaps it was Leucade, Kefalonia, Duliquio, or Corfu? It doesn’t matter to us. The reality is that Odysseus’ route is estimated between 3,800 (from 40º East, that is, Troy, to 6º West, Hades of Gibraltar) and 4,650 kilometers, in an area of more than five million km²perfectly navigable in a much wider sea. Of course, there are proposals for locations that even talk about Ireland, the Black Sea or the Azores. Or that the nymph Calypso kept Ulysses locked up on Parsley Island for seven years. What is clear, because the book says so, is that the journey takes ten years, twenty if we count from the departure to the return: when he returns, his son Telemachus is already an adult and barely retains memories of his father. I repeat it in the list, which is easier this way:
- Troy
- Ismaro (cicones)
- Country of the lotus eaters
- Cyclops
- Aeolus
- Laestrygonians
- Circe
- Hades
- Mermaids
- Scylla and Charybdis
- Trinacia
- Ogygia
- Esqueria
- Ithaca
Many of these places can be related to real scenarios. The mermaids are usually located off the coast of Campania. Scylla and Charybdis are reminiscent of the Strait of Messina, between Sicily and Calabria. The island of Circe has been identified with Mount Circeo, south of Rome. Other episodes remain open because Homer never offers precise coordinates and whoever reads a specific point on his narrative map is because, too often, it is contaminated by some proximity bias. Your Mediterranean, more than an atlas, is a sandbox.
Gibraltar was the true end of the world
Even Spain is part of that playground. When Homer wrote the Odysseythe Greeks knew the western end of the Mediterranean, but little else. But between the 7th and 6th centuries BC. C. they began to sail further and founded colonies such as Emporion (modern Empúries), trading with Phoenicians and discovering a territory extraordinarily rich in metals: Tartessos. Silver, copper and tin were abundant in Tartessos. Normal, if it was located between the mouths of the Guadalquivir and the Guadiana and the area served as a natural filter and economic center.
But no place better symbolizes this mythical-historical transformation than the Strait of Gibraltar (Gadir). There the Mediterranean of Serrat disappeared and an immense ocean began, so that was the end. The separation of both continents, Africa and Europe, were the Cabbageumnas of Hercules. The Rock of Gibraltar and the mountain of Jebel Musa, on the Moroccan coast, once supported an identical vault. That door that separated the civilized world from the unknown outside is the first connection between the ‘Odyssey’ and the Iberian Peninsula.
And beyond: the Garden of the Hesperides, where the golden apple trees were guarded by a dragon, placed on the Atlantic coast of North Africa or even in the Fortunate Islands, identified centuries later with the Canary Islands.
The journey of Ulysses that has not yet ended
Seen from the 21st century, Ulysses seems to navigate with a broken GPS. He was more lost than an octopus in a garage, crossing the sea without a job or benefit, like a drunk captain. The fault was not his, of course: after blinding the Cyclops Polyphemus, Poseidon turns every attempt to return to Ithaca into a new defeat. Storms, currents, winds and shipwrecks force the hero to travel thousands of extra kilometers. The Odyssey is the trolled definitive epic. I hope this map helps you illustrate it.
And it seems that Nolan has opted for the epic view, for an authorial reconceptualization that prefers to talk about original sin, about subjectivity within a cosmos of swords and sandals instead of seeking the maximum possible historical accuracy. Or comedy, which is always good. Two thousand years ago, Greek navigators already knew how to write great telemachies. Nolan purges and expurges much of the original text to concentrate the force on visual poetry. We already put the joke.
Images | Tomás Fernández and Elena Tamaro in “Summary of Homer’s Odyssey” / The Odyssey (2026, Universal Pictures)
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