Where Is Duckburg Located in Real Life?

From 'DuckTales,' now streaming on Disney+

Life is like a hurricane here in Duckburg, the bustling metropolis where anthropomorphic drakes chase fortunes, dreams, and the occasional flying saucer. This capitalist fantasyland is home to the insanely wealthy Scrooge McDuck and his famous nephew Donald Duck. 

Duckburg first appeared in comic books in 1944 as a creation of Disney illustrator Carl Barks. He gave the city a rich, if occasionally inconsistent, backstory, even placing it in the fictional state of Calisota, a portmanteau of "California" and "Minnesota."

Barks would later inspire comic book artist Don Rosa to build on the Donald Duck universe. Rosa expanded Duckburg's fictional history through "The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck," in which he gave a more precise geography and timeline for the city. He located Duckburg along the fictional Audubon Bay on the Pacific Coast of the US. Just across the bay lies St. Canard, the island city endeared to fans as the home of the caped vigilante Darkwing Duck.

Although some fans theorize that Duckburg lies on the East Coast, pointing to its fictional founding as a 16th-century British settlement, Rosa had other ideas. He hinted that the real-life equivalent of Duckburg could be the city of Eureka in northern California. 

"I won't describe precisely where I placed Duckburg—and by extension, its state of Calisota—on America's west coast," he commented on one of his Scrooge McDuck comics. "But if you get out a good map and compare the coastline, you'll see that I stuck the old gold-prospector's adopted hometown directly across the bay from a very—appropriately—named actual city."

If we're allowed a bit of quackery, we'd like to think that's in Indiana, home to the largest duck farms in the US. But Barks and Rosa's imaginative world-building is something else, and with Duckburg, they have given a whole new meaning to a "canard."

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