Search for "the real place behind Spirited Away" and you will get a confident answer with a photograph. Search a little further and you will get four confident answers with four photographs. The studio has confirmed remarkably few of these connections, and it has explicitly denied at least one of the most popular. Here is what I can actually stand behind.
Documented, on the record
Welsh mining valleys — Castle in the Sky
Miyazaki visited Wales in 1984, during the miners' strike, and has spoken directly about the impression the communities and the industrial landscape made on him. The mining town at the start of Castle in the Sky, and its politics, come out of that trip. This one is unambiguous.
The Edo-Tokyo Open Air Architectural Museum, Koganei — Spirited Away
An open-air museum of relocated historic Japanese buildings, a short distance from the studio. Miyazaki is closely associated with it and has described it as a source for the film's world — the shopfronts, the bathhouse fittings, the general texture of a slightly-too-recent past. If you want the single most defensible Spirited Away pilgrimage, it is this, and it happens to be near the Ghibli Museum.
Gotland and Stockholm — Kiki's Delivery Service
The production sent staff to Sweden to scout, and the city of Koriko is an invented composite drawn substantially from Visby on Gotland and from Stockholm. It is deliberately a city that never existed: a European seaside town in a Europe where the twentieth century's wars did not happen.
Tomonoura, Hiroshima Prefecture — Ponyo
Miyazaki spent time in this small port town on the Seto Inland Sea in 2005, and it is widely and openly acknowledged as the seaside setting's basis. The town has leaned into it, and the relationship is not in dispute.
Yakushima and Shiratani Unsuikyo — Princess Mononoke
The moss-covered cedar forest on Yakushima, a subtropical island south of Kyushu, was used as reference by the production, and the resemblance is not subtle. The film's forest is not a portrait of the place, but the vocabulary — the moss, the light through the canopy, the water — is Yakushima's.
Sayama Hills, Saitama — My Neighbor Totoro
Miyazaki has lived near Tokorozawa for decades, and the wooded hills at the edge of the Tokyo sprawl inform the film's landscape. He has been publicly involved in the conservation trust working to protect them from development, and the area is locally known by a Totoro-derived name as a result. The relationship between film and place here runs in both directions.
The forest did not get its name from the film. The film's name got attached to the forest, because the man who made it kept turning up to defend it.
Claimed, unconfirmed, or denied
Jiufen, Taiwan — Spirited Away
The most persistent claim on the internet, repeated by tour operators and travel media constantly. Studio Ghibli has publicly denied it. The hillside town's red lanterns and stepped alleys are genuinely beautiful and genuinely worth visiting; they are not the source of the film, and the studio has said so.
Dogo Onsen, Matsuyama — Spirited Away
A very old bathhouse with an elaborate wooden bathing hall, endlessly cited as "the" model for Aburaya. The studio has never confirmed a single real bathhouse as the model, and the film's own design draws on many buildings. Call it an influence among many, not a source.
Colmar, Alsace — Howl's Moving Castle
Frequently asserted, and the timbered old town does look like the film. What is documented is the general Alsatian and southern German visual register of the setting, which Diana Wynne Jones's novel already implies. A specific confirmed connection to Colmar is not something I can point to.
Various "Ghibli villages"
A steady supply of these appears in travel content: a stone-stepped hamlet, a mossy shrine, a bamboo grove, presented as a film's secret original. Nearly all are aesthetic resemblance dressed as sourcing. The films' settings are usually composites, drawn from sketchbooks filled across many trips, and they are usually not portraits of anywhere.
Why the distinction matters
Partly accuracy, but mostly courtesy. Several of these places are small residential towns that now receive large numbers of visitors on the strength of a connection that may not exist. Sayama Hills is an actively managed conservation site. Tomonoura is a working port with a few thousand residents. Going is fine — going with the belief that the place owes you a film is not.
My own rule, arrived at the hard way: if the only source for a connection is a listicle, another listicle, and a photo gallery, treat it as folklore. If the studio, the director, or contemporaneous production coverage says it, treat it as sourced. There is a surprising amount in the second category, and you do not need the first.
Where I describe something as documented, it is on the public record from the studio, the director, or contemporaneous production coverage. Where it is not, I say so. If you have a citation that changes an entry here, please send it: contact.