The opensource cartography software QGIS is very useful to architects for creating site plans or master plans to show the location of a project in its built environment. In this tutorial, we'll show you how to create a map showing the location of the Biscione, a famous social housing development standing like a rampart above the city of Genoa, in the shape of a snake that hugs the topographical lines of a slope wedged between sea and mountain. We'll be looking at how to create contour lines and render a dsm raster as hillshad ; then how to download buildings from OpenStreetMap with the QuickOSM plugin, as well as natural features such as sea and rivers or administrative boundaries. We also see how to highlight a building by creating a new metadata field in a shapefile and assigning colors to this layer in a categorized way according to this metadata. Finally, we look at how to lay out this map by adapting orientation, scale and framing.