Bond has been racking up air miles since 1962, when Dr. No put Sean Connery on a Jamaican beach. Sixty-plus years later, the franchise's filming locations have become holidays in their own right — and with the "next Bond" debate still rumbling on, fans are revisiting the real places behind the spy's globetrotting missions.
The most cinematic of the lot might be Matera in southern Italy, where Daniel Craig's final outing No Time To Die staged an Aston Martin chase. One of the world's oldest continuously inhabited settlements and a former European Capital of Culture, its cave-carved sassi districts are reason enough to visit without the movie connection. Craig also drove Norway's Atlantic Ocean Road in the same film, which has since become a road-trip draw in itself.
Some places are so tied to 007 they've adopted the name. Thailand's Phang Nga Bay is widely known as "James Bond Island" after its role in the franchise. In the Swiss Alps, the Schilthorn summit station — nearly 3,000 metres up in the Bernese Alps — doubled as Blofeld's lair in On Her Majesty's Secret Service, and today you can ride a cable car to the revolving Piz Gloria restaurant for fondue beside a permanent cast walk of fame.
Cities have done well out of Bond too. Istanbul has hosted the series three times, from From Russia With Love through Skyfall's rooftop motorbike chase, with the Grand Bazaar, Basilica Cistern and Hagia Sophia all appearing on screen. Mexico City opened 2015's Spectre with a huge Day of the Dead parade — so evocative that the city launched a real one in November 2016, now an annual fixture. Tangier has appeared twice and has genuine spy credentials of its own, once a real haven for agents and pirates; Cairo's The Spy Who Loved Me locations, including the Gayer-Anderson Museum and Ibn Tulun Mosque, now feature in fan tours.
Closer to Bond's roots, the Scottish Highlands deliver Glencoe and Glen Etive, where the A82 past the Buachaille peaks stood in for the drive to Skyfall Lodge, while 13th-century Eilean Donan Castle played a Scottish MI6 base in The World Is Not Enough. And in Jamaica, where Ian Fleming invented the character, you can stay at the luxury resort that opened in 2011 at Goldeneye — Fleming's former home — or seek out the Port Antonio bay where Bond's beach-hut retirement home was built for No Time To Die.
For travellers, this is a ready-made theme itinerary: city breaks in Mexico City or Istanbul, a southern Italian culture fix in Matera, an Alpine cable-car lunch with 007 views, or a Caribbean beach pilgrimage — each with a genuine film-location hook.
