Random location generator
Press spin to draw a place
Press Generate to spin through 50 places.
About this tool
Draw one of 50 famous places on Earth, from Angkor Wat to the Faroe Islands. Each result gives the country, the kind of place and its exact coordinates.
In the draw
All 50 places, by continent
The full list, so you know what can come up. Coordinates are in decimal degrees; select a pair and paste it into any map app.
Europe11
Eiffel TowerLandmark
France48.86° N, 2.29° E
SantoriniIsland
Greece36.39° N, 25.46° E
ColosseumHistoric Site
Italy41.89° N, 12.49° E
ReykjavikCity
Iceland64.15° N, 21.94° W
Plitvice LakesNatural Wonder
Croatia44.87° N, 15.58° E
Lake BledNatural Wonder
Slovenia46.37° N, 14.11° E
Fjords of NorwayNatural Wonder
Norway62.10° N, 7.20° E
StonehengeHistoric Site
United Kingdom51.18° N, 1.83° W
Blue LagoonNatural Wonder
Iceland63.88° N, 22.45° W
Mont Saint-MichelLandmark
France48.64° N, 1.51° W
Faroe IslandsIsland
Faroe Islands62.01° N, 6.79° W
Asia12
Great Wall of ChinaHistoric Site
China40.43° N, 116.57° E
PetraHistoric Site
Jordan30.33° N, 35.44° E
Taj MahalLandmark
India27.18° N, 78.04° E
Mount FujiMountain
Japan35.36° N, 138.73° E
KyotoCity
Japan35.01° N, 135.77° E
Angkor WatHistoric Site
Cambodia13.41° N, 103.87° E
Dead SeaNatural Wonder
Jordan31.56° N, 35.47° E
ZhangjiajieNatural Wonder
China29.32° N, 110.48° E
Ha Long BayNatural Wonder
Vietnam20.91° N, 107.18° E
Petronas TowersLandmark
Malaysia3.16° N, 101.71° E
Mount Everest Base CampMountain
Nepal28.00° N, 86.85° E
PalawanIsland
Philippines9.83° N, 118.74° E
Africa8
Mount KilimanjaroMountain
Tanzania3.07° S, 37.36° E
Serengeti National ParkNatural Wonder
Tanzania2.33° S, 34.83° E
Victoria FallsNatural Wonder
Zambia17.92° S, 25.86° E
Cape TownCity
South Africa33.92° S, 18.42° E
MarrakechCity
Morocco31.63° N, 7.98° W
Table MountainMountain
South Africa33.96° S, 18.41° E
Pyramids of GizaHistoric Site
Egypt29.98° N, 31.13° E
SossusvleiNatural Wonder
Namibia24.73° S, 15.30° E
North America6
Grand CanyonNatural Wonder
United States36.11° N, 112.11° W
Niagara FallsNatural Wonder
Canada43.10° N, 79.04° W
Banff National ParkNatural Wonder
Canada51.50° N, 115.93° W
Antelope CanyonNatural Wonder
United States36.86° N, 111.37° W
Chichen ItzaHistoric Site
Mexico20.68° N, 88.57° W
Yellowstone National ParkNatural Wonder
United States44.43° N, 110.59° W
South America7
Machu PicchuHistoric Site
Peru13.16° S, 72.55° W
Christ the RedeemerLandmark
Brazil22.95° S, 43.21° W
Salar de UyuniNatural Wonder
Bolivia20.13° S, 67.49° W
Santa CruzIsland
Ecuador0.62° S, 90.33° W
Iguazu FallsNatural Wonder
Argentina25.70° S, 54.44° W
Amazon RainforestNatural Wonder
Brazil3.47° S, 62.22° W
Lake TiticacaNatural Wonder
Peru15.80° S, 69.34° W
Oceania5
Sydney Opera HouseLandmark
Australia33.86° S, 151.22° E
Great Barrier ReefNatural Wonder
Australia18.29° S, 147.70° E
Bora BoraIsland
French Polynesia16.50° S, 151.74° W
UluruNatural Wonder
Australia25.34° S, 131.04° E
Milford SoundNatural Wonder
New Zealand44.67° S, 167.93° E
Antarctica1
Antarctic PeninsulaNatural Wonder
Antarctica63.25° S, 57.00° W
Reading the result
What the coordinates mean
Latitude is the first number: how far north or south of the equator a place is, from 0° at the equator to 90° at the poles. Longitude is the second: how far east or west of the prime meridian through Greenwich, from 0° to 180°.
In decimal form, north and east are positive, south and west are negative. Machu Picchu, at about −13.16, −72.55, is south of the equator and west of Greenwich.
One degree of latitude is roughly 111 km anywhere on Earth. A degree of longitude is 111 km at the equator and shrinks to nothing at the poles, which is why maps that stretch the poles make Greenland look the size of Africa.
- 1 decimal
- ≈ 11 km
- A city or a large park
- 2 decimals
- ≈ 1.1 km
- A neighbourhood
- 3 decimals
- ≈ 110 m
- A street or a field
- 4 decimals
- ≈ 11 m
- A building or a viewpoint
- 5 decimals
- ≈ 1.1 m
- A person standing there
Decimal places and precision
Want a whole country instead of a single place? The Random Country Generator draws from every country and territory, and the landlocked countries guide maps the 45 with no coast at all.
Step by step
How to use the random location generator
- 01
Choose famous places or any point
Famous places draws from 50 landmarks, cities, islands and natural wonders. Any point on Earth produces a genuinely random coordinate, anywhere on the planet’s surface.
- 02
Narrow the draw if you want
In famous places mode, pick a continent, a kind of place, or both. The count under the filters shows how many places are left in the draw.
- 03
Turn on No repeats for a set
With No repeats ticked, each place can only come up once until the filtered list is used up. Useful when a class or a group needs everyone to get a different place.
- 04
Generate
Places spin past on a reel and stop on the winner, which opens a card with the country, the type of place, coordinates and a short description. Random points appear instantly.
- 05
Open the map or copy the details
Each result links to Google Maps, and random points also link to OpenStreetMap. Copy puts the name and coordinates on your clipboard.
- 06
Export the list
Every result goes into the history with its coordinates. Download it as a CSV and it opens straight in a spreadsheet or a mapping tool.
Two kinds of random
Famous places or any point on Earth?
The two modes answer different questions. Famous places answers “where should I read about, plan for or show the class today?” Every result is somewhere with a name, a story and something to look at. Any point on Earth answers “what is actually out there?” and the honest answer is usually water.
Oceans cover about 71% of the planet, so roughly seven random points in ten land at sea. Of the points that land on dry ground, a large share fall in deserts, on ice or in the boreal forests of Canada and Siberia. Antarctica alone is close to a tenth of all land. A run of ten random points that includes a city is unusual. That is not a flaw in the generator; it is a fairly accurate picture of how empty most of the planet is.
Random points are useful precisely because they are unglamorous: they make good starting points for a lesson on ocean currents, for a game of guessing which country is nearest, or for exploring a remote corner of the satellite map you would never have chosen yourself.
How the point is drawn
Why random coordinates need a little care
The obvious method, picking a latitude between −90 and 90 and a longitude between −180 and 180, is wrong. It crowds points towards the poles.
Lines of longitude meet at the poles, so a one-degree band of latitude near the North Pole is a tiny cap, while the same one-degree band at the equator is a belt around the whole planet. Picking latitudes evenly would put as many points in the small polar band as in the huge equatorial one.
This generator picks the latitude so that every square kilometre of the surface has the same chance. Technically, it takes the arcsine of a random number between −1 and 1, which is the standard way to sample a sphere evenly. Longitude can be picked evenly, because every meridian is the same length.
The table shows what that means in practice. Half the planet’s surface lies within 30 degrees of the equator, so half of all random points do too. The areas inside the Arctic and Antarctic circles together make up under a tenth of the surface, even though they span almost a quarter of the range of latitudes.
| Band | Share of surface |
|---|---|
| Within 10° of the equator | 17.4% |
| Between the tropics (23.4°) | 39.8% |
| Within 30° of the equator | 50.0% |
| Within 45° | 70.7% |
| Within 60° | 86.6% |
| Inside the polar circles (66.6°) | 91.7% |
| Beyond the polar circles | 8.3% |
Reading the numbers
Turning coordinates into distances
Every result comes with a latitude and a longitude. Two rules of thumb make those numbers meaningful without a calculator.
- One degree of latitude is about 111 km (69 miles), anywhere on Earth. A place at 48° N is about 1,330 km further north than one at 36° N.
- A degree of longitude shrinks towards the poles. It is about 111 km at the equator, about 79 km at 45° and about 56 km at 60°. Multiply 111 km by the cosine of the latitude for a close estimate.
For the distance between two results, map apps measure the great-circle route, the shortest path over a sphere. That is why flight paths from Europe to North America curve up over Greenland on a flat map: the curve is the straight line on the globe.
The coordinate formats are interchangeable. 48.8584, 2.2945 is the same point as 48.8584° N, 2.2945° E. Positive latitudes are north of the equator and negative ones south; positive longitudes are east of Greenwich and negative ones west. Copy the decimal form when pasting into a map search box, since that is what every map service accepts.
The other side of the world
Finding the antipode of any result
Every point on Earth has an antipode, the point exactly opposite it, where a straight line through the centre of the planet would come out. Working it out from a result takes ten seconds:
- Flip the sign of the latitude: 40° N becomes 40° S.
- Add 180 to the longitude if it is west (negative), or subtract 180 if it is east (positive): 3.7° W becomes 176.3° E.
Try it on a few famous places and you will notice that almost every antipode lands in the ocean, because the hemisphere opposite most land is the vast Pacific and Southern Ocean. The well-known exceptions are worth remembering: much of Spain and Portugal sits opposite New Zealand, and parts of Argentina and Chile sit opposite China and Mongolia.
In “Any point on Earth” mode the antipode of a random point is itself a random point, so a sea result on one side and a land result on the other is the rarer case, and the land-and-land pair is rarer still. It makes a good extension question after a geography lesson on the distribution of land and water.
Things to do with a result
Ideas for classrooms, travel and games
In a geography lesson
- Find it first. Generate a place, read out only the name, and ask students to point to it on a blank world map before revealing the coordinates.
- Climate from latitude. Generate a random point and ask what the climate there is likely to be from latitude alone, then check the satellite view.
- One place each. Turn on No repeats so every student gets a different landmark for a short presentation, and export the history as the class list.
For travel planning
Filter to a continent you are planning to visit and generate a handful of places to build a shortlist. Each card links to the map, and the country guides cover capitals, currencies, languages and neighbours for the country each place sits in.
As a game
- Nearest country. Generate a random point, keep the map closed, and let everyone guess the nearest country. Closest guess wins the round.
- Land or sea. Before each random point, everyone calls land or sea. With the sea winning seven times in ten, it is a quick lesson in base rates.
- Story setting. Generate a famous place and write a short story set there, or pair it with the random date generator for a time as well as a place.
Before you go
A random place is not a travel recommendation
The famous places are well known and most are open to visitors, but that does not mean every one is easy, cheap or safe to reach right now. Access to some sites is restricted or needs permits, several are in remote areas with extreme weather, and conditions in any country can change. Check your government’s current travel advice and the site’s own visitor information before booking anything.
Random points come with no warnings at all. Many land in the open ocean, on private land, in military areas or in places with no roads, so treat them as something to explore on a map, not as a destination.
Nothing you generate is stored or sent anywhere. The draw, the filters and the history all live in your browser tab, and the map links only open when you click them.
The famous places list
What is in the draw
The 50 places were chosen to be recognisable, worth reading about and spread around the world. This is how they break down, so you know what a filter will leave you with.
| Continent | City | Historic Site | Island | Landmark | Mountain | Natural Wonder | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Africa | 2 | 1 | – | – | 2 | 3 | 8 |
| Antarctica | – | – | – | – | – | 1 | 1 |
| Asia | 1 | 3 | 1 | 2 | 2 | 3 | 12 |
| Europe | 1 | 2 | 2 | 2 | – | 4 | 11 |
| North America | – | 1 | – | – | – | 5 | 6 |
| Oceania | – | – | 1 | 1 | – | 3 | 5 |
| South America | – | 1 | 1 | 1 | – | 4 | 7 |
Some combinations are empty, so combining a continent with a type of place can leave nothing in the draw; the counter under the filters shows this before you press Generate. Where a place could fit two types, such as a mountain that is also a natural wonder, it is listed under the one it is best known for.
The list favours places that most people have heard of, which means it leans towards sites that already attract visitors. For somewhere you are genuinely unlikely to have seen, switch to Any point on Earth.
FAQ