‘Journey over all the universe in a map, without the expense and fatigue of traveling, without suffering the inconveniences of heat, cold, hunger, and thirst.’
(Miguel de Cervantes, in Don Quixote)

Maps are graphic representations that facilitate a spatial understanding of things, concepts, conditions, processes, or events in the human world.
(Definition formulated in 1987 by the late Brian Harley and David Woodward at the beginning of the first volume of their monumental and still incomplete History of Cartography)