Five towns on five lakes on four continents, each of which has spent a very long time insisting that something large lives in the water — and has built a statue, a museum or an entire tourist season on the strength of it.
The village sits in Glen Urquhart on the A82, beside Urquhart Castle and the deepest stretch of Loch Ness, and is the headquarters of the Loch Ness legend. The Inverness Courier carried Aldie Mackay's sighting on 2 May 1933; Robert Kenneth Wilson's 'Surgeon's Photograph' of 1934 was revealed as a hoax in 1994.
The town stands on Storsjön in Jämtland, home of the Storsjöodjuret. The Jämtland county board granted the creature protected status in 1986 and revoked it in November 2005. The bridge crosses to Frösön, whose runestone is the northernmost in the world and the province's own monument to its conversion to Christianity.
On the Satsuma Peninsula in Kagoshima Prefecture, the town is known for its sunamushi onsen black-sand baths. Kaimondake, 924 m, is nicknamed Satsuma Fuji. Lake Ikeda, Kyushu's largest, holds the monster legend 'Issie' and a well-documented population of giant eels.
On Okanagan Lake in British Columbia, the city takes its name from the Okanagan word for grizzly bear. The Syilx knew the lake creature as n̓x̌ax̌aitkʷ long before settlers renamed it Ogopogo in the 1920s. Father Charles Pandosy's mission of 1859 was the valley's first permanent non-Indigenous settlement.
The city stands on Lake Nahuel Huapi — Mapudungun for 'island of the jaguar' — and its monster is Nahuelito. Nahuel Huapi, created in 1934, is Argentina's oldest national park. Alejandro Bustillo's 1940 Centro Cívico set the Alpine style the whole town was subsequently built in.
Think you'd have found them? Play today's expedition, or replay this one from the archive.