Best Cities to Catch the Rarest Pokémon in the U.S.

Every Pokémon GO spawn is drawn from a pool tied to your GPS coordinates. Most of that pool is the same everywhere. Regionals are the exception: Niantic assigns each one a country, a continent, a coastline, or a latitude band, and outside those lines it’s not in the pool at all. Walking further, hatching more eggs, and burning Incense do nothing, because the spawn table you’re rolling against never had it.

That makes regionals the one Pokédex gap a bus ticket can close. Spoofing gets accounts banned, so you can go there, get it traded to you, or wait for the game to lift the lock for a weekend.

• Your location decides, not your account or your level. Cross the line and the spawns change with you.
• Zones vary wildly. One is a handful of states, one is a stretch of warm coastline, one is a single island chain.
• Once it’s yours it stays yours, and you can trade it to anyone you meet in person.

Bouffalant and Carnivine are the two regionals locked to a slice of the U.S. and nowhere else, and both are reachable by bus. Heracross and Maractus spill over from Latin America into south Florida and south Texas. Corsola needs a warm coastline south of 31°N. Comfey is Hawaii only. Counting forms like Paldean Tauros separately, that’s roughly sixteen regionals you can get across the U.S. already, a handful that need a trip inside the U.S., one up in Alaska and Canada, and around thirty you’ll have to trade for. The trade-only number is a floor: count every Furfrou trim and Flabébé color and that pile grows well past thirty.

Players call a shiny Charmander and a Kangaskhan both “rare,” but the fix is different for each. This page runs on one tier system for all six, cheapest first:

These five need a specific corner of the U.S. Corsola’s band also covers the tropics worldwide, and Heracross is really a Latin American regional, but Florida and the Gulf are the U.S. piece of both. For each one: where it spawns, what the trip takes, and a bus that gets you inside the fence.

Bouffalant (Normal): New York City and the Northeast corridor

The tightest spawn zone in the country, and the best connected one. Bouffalant sticks to New York City and its surroundings, with reports running down through New Jersey, Philadelphia, and into the DC area, so it’s a day trip from anywhere in the Northeast. Head for the parks once you’re there. Easy buses in: Baltimore, Philadelphia, or Albany to New York.

Carnivine (Grass): the Southeastern U.S.

A whole corner of the country rather than one metro, so it’s the most forgiving of the bunch. Georgia counts, Florida counts, and south Florida also clears Corsola’s bar, so one Miami trip can close out both. Cheapest way in is usually Atlanta, Orlando, or Tampa to Miami.

Corsola (Water/Rock): warm coastline, below 31°N

The picky one. Corsola needs two conditions at once: south of 31°N and close to the coast, and it thins out fast as you move inland. That rules out most of the country and rules in the Gulf Coast plus every Florida shoreline. Orlando fails the coast test. San Diego fails the latitude test. Miami passes both. Buses in from Jacksonville, Fort Lauderdale, or New York to Miami.

Heracross (Bug/Fighting): south Florida and south Texas

A Latin American regional that reaches over the border, with Maractus tagging along near the Texas line. Miami clears Heracross too, which makes south Florida the single best Pokédex trip in the country: Carnivine, Corsola, and Heracross in one weekend, on the same Miami buses listed above.

Comfey (Fairy): Hawaii only

The hard one for anyone on the mainland, and the one place a ground-travel site can’t help. No bus goes to Hawaii. We checked. Trade for Comfey, or catch it on a holiday you were already taking.

Corsola is the only U.S. regional gated by latitude instead of borders, and the cutoff lands awkwardly: 31°N runs along the top of the Florida panhandle and through south Georgia, so Savannah and Jacksonville, two coastal cities a couple of hours apart, sit on opposite sides of the fence. San Diego (32.7°N) and Savannah (32.1°N) are outside the band; Jacksonville (30.3°N), Corpus Christi (27.8°N), and Miami (25.8°N) are inside it.

Latitude is only half of it. Corsola sticks close to the water, so an inland city inside the band still won’t produce it. The whole Gulf Coast qualifies, from Corpus Christi through New Orleans and Mobile, and so does every Florida shoreline.

Check your own backyard before booking anything. These spawn across the U.S., or, for Azelf, Blacephalon, and Buzzwole, show up in raids: Tauros, Paldean Aqua Breed Tauros, Illumise, Seviper, Throh, Azelf, Panpour, Lunatone, Durant, Blacephalon, Buzzwole, West Sea Shellos, Blue Stripe Basculin, Pom-Pom Oricorio, Yellow Flabébé, Debutante Furfrou, Blue Plumage Squawkabilly, and Droopy Form Tatsugiri.

Tauros covers the U.S., southern Canada, and northern Mexico. Illumise, Seviper, and Throh each have an opposite number locked to Europe, Asia, or Australia, so a player there wants yours as badly as you want theirs. Assignments do move: Lunatone and Solrock swapped hemispheres in 2020 and never swapped back, and Volbeat and Illumise have gone global for a week at a time, so check a live tracker before planning around them.

Everything else spawns somewhere you aren’t. Mr. Mime, Kangaskhan, Farfetch’d, Stonjourner, Klefki, and Sigilyph won’t spawn in the U.S. no matter how far you walk, and neither will the rest of the foreign regionals. No trip fixes these. Four things work instead.

• Trade for it. Any regional can be traded in person by two players standing together. A friend who travels beats a plane ticket. It costs a pile of Stardust unless you’re Best Friends, and Mythicals (Meltan aside) can’t be traded at all.
• Get a remote raid invite. Mesprit and Uxie are region-locked but show up in raids, so a friend abroad can invite you from your sofa. Remote passes are capped at ten a day, and invites only cover raid bosses, not wild spawns.
• Pin postcards. Vivillon is built for this. Pin a postcard from another region and you unlock that region’s Scatterbug pattern, all 18 of them. It’s slow, and you need friends in the right places.
• Wait for an event. Regionals occasionally go global for GO Fest, GO Tour, or an anniversary, and Niantic’s in-person City Safari weekends land in walkable downtowns that are usually a bus ride away. They’re unpredictable and usually free up only a handful at a time. Check the official Pokémon GO events page for what’s next.

Trading is how the rest gets to you, and the rules are stricter than people remember: trades happen in person, within about 100 meters of each other; an unregistered regional counts as a Special Trade, which is limited to one per day outside events; and the Stardust cost falls steeply with friendship, so build to Best Friends first.

That isn’t the whole list. Regional forms of Furfrou, Flabébé, Oricorio, Squawkabilly, and Paldean Tauros stack more entries on top, and a few of these have moved before. Pachirisu (Electric) spawns across Canada, Alaska, and other far-northern regions, the nearest foreign regional for most of the Lower 48 and technically a U.S. one if you count Alaska. Worth a detour if you’re already heading north.

Can you get regional Pokémon without traveling?
Yes. In-person trading covers every regional except Mythicals, remote raid invites cover the raid-locked ones like Mesprit and Uxie, and Vivillon patterns unlock through postcards from faraway friends.

Which Pokémon can only be caught in the U.S.?
Bouffalant comes closest, spawning around New York City and the Northeast corridor. Carnivine covers the Southeast, Tauros covers the U.S., southern Canada, and northern Mexico, and the wider Western Hemisphere set fills out the rest.

Where can you catch Corsola in the U.S.?
South of 31°N and close to the coast. In practice that means Florida and the Gulf Coast down through south Texas.

Is Comfey available outside Hawaii?
No. It has never spawned in the continental U.S., so a trade with someone who caught one in Hawaii is the realistic route.

Do regional Pokémon change regions?
They have before. Lunatone and Solrock swapped hemispheres in 2020, and Volbeat and Illumise have gone global for a week at a time, so check a current tracker before you book anything around one spawn.

Regional assignments rotate, so treat every zone on this page as current, not permanent. Sources: Pokémon GO Hub’s region-exclusive list and the official Pokémon GO in-person events page.

When Pokémon GO launched in 2016, Facebook groups and Reddit forums filled up with questions about the best places to catch the rarest Pokémon, and the crowd-sourced maps of the time didn’t make it easy to compare cities across the country. So we reviewed photos and videos from 250 cities in the U.S. to find the home of epic, mythical and special Pokémon, using the Twitter API to count the total number of sightings and look at the diversity of species found in each city. The spawn pool has changed many times since, so read this as a snapshot of where trainers were finding rare Pokémon that first summer.

Note: This list contains epic, mythical, and special Pokémon from the original Kanto region, the only Pokémon in the game at the time. Based on the high frequency of Bulbasaur, Charmander, Squirtle, and Pikachu sightings, these Pokémon were excluded from our list.

After Niantic’s release of Pokémon GO across the UK on July 14th, Facebook groups and Reddit forums there filled up with the same question. With the app’s continual ban of players who are spoofing their location to find the rarest Pokémon, a map goes a long way in helping you find the most rare ones out there. So we ran the same study across the Atlantic: we reviewed photos and videos from more than 67 cities in the UK to find the ones with the best selection of epic, mythical and special Pokémon, using the Twitter API to count the total number of sightings and look at the diversity of species found in each city.

The best way to fill out your Pokédex is to visit the cities with the widest diversity of epic, mythical and special Pokémon. Although all the cities included in the map have confirmed sightings, only a select few deserve the title of the best cities to catch rare Pokémon.

To no-one’s surprise, London is leading the pack throughout the UK with the widest diversity of Pokémon sightings, featuring Porygon, Mr. Mime, Electabuzz, Snorlax, and Lapras. With more sightings than other popular cities like Glasgow and Liverpool, London is the best destination for catching the rarest Pokémon across the UK. Take a trip from Glasgow to London, from Manchester to London, or from Leeds to London to try your hand at catching these rare creatures.

This, however, doesn’t mean that you have to visit the London Eye just to get a Snorlax, as there are other cities popular for Pokémon catching. Following closely behind London, in terms of diversity, Kingston offers Pokémon trainers a great selection of rare Pokémon. The most popular sightings in Kingston include Aerodactyl, Mr. Mime, Hitmonlee, Electabuzz, and Snorlax.

If you’d like to venture beyond major cities, then you can also check out the Pokémon in Sunderland and Wakefield. With an equal number of Pokémon sightings, these two cities will help you capture the elusive Dratini, Porygon, and Lapras.

Visiting cities with a diverse group of Pokémon is one way to fill out your Pokédex, but just because one trainer found Mr. Mime in London does not mean you’ll have the same experience. We also looked at the number of sightings in each UK city to find those with the largest number of rare Pokémon sightings.

Except from having the most diverse selection of Pokémon, it appears as though London also has the highest population of creatures hidden around the city. From the Slowpoke nest near Buckingham Palace to the Eevee nests hiding in Kensington Palace, you’ll find it easy to catch rare Pokémon and base type Pokémon to evolve into the ultimate Pokémon trainer.

Traveling south, Kingston is another very popular destination for Pokémon hunting in the UK. Trainers in the area have curated a map and reported a Lickitung nest in Bushy Park and a Machop nest in Richmond Park. Aside from these two Pokémon, the high density of Mr. Mime in the area will help you complete your Pokédex. 

If you can’t go to London, that doesn’t mean you can’t fill out your Pokédex quite nicely. Travel from Peterborough to Norwich, from Horley to Norwich, or from Brighton to Norwich to catch the elusive Lapras and Snorlax. To get your hands on the hard-to-find Porygon, travel from Manchester to Aberdeen, from Preston to Aberdeen, or from Perth to Aberdeen. Wanderu can help you get to the ideal Pokémon hunting grounds by finding you the best deals on buses and trains in the UK.