Casino Royale: Prague to the Grand Canal

The film opens in black and white with Bond killing the traitorous MI6 section chief Dryden and his contact in Prague, and the office is real, not a set: Danube House, a new block in the River City complex on the banks of the Vltava in Karlín. By the end of the sequence Bond has his 00 number. Principal photography began in Prague on 27 January 2006; the crew came back to the Czech Republic in April, after the Bahamas.

Madagascar is not in Madagascar. The film's chase, in which Bond runs the length of a building site and then swings a digger at Mollaka, was shot at an abandoned hotel site at Coral Harbour, New Providence. It was one of three sequences the effects team built for real instead of in software. The hotel was never finished and the site has since become part of a military base, so the digger stunt now exists only in the cut.

Location precision: The unfinished hotel is gone and the site is now inside a military base; the pin marks the Coral Harbour shoreline.

After the chase, Bond settles into an ocean-view villa at the One and Only Ocean Club, a resort on the eastern end of Paradise Island that opened as a hotel in 1962. Here he seduces the wife of Alex Dimitrios, the corrupt Greek official who hired Mollaka to bomb Skyfleet's prototype airliner, and learns that Dimitrios is heading for Miami International Airport. Bond has been to the island before: Thunderball was partly shot on Paradise Island too.

Visitor guidance: The One and Only Ocean Club is a public resort on the eastern end of Paradise Island, across from Nassau Harbour.

M gets a dressing-down from her superiors in a committee room meant to be the House of Commons, and the room is not in London at all: it is the Philosophical Hall in the library of Strahov Monastery, a Premonstratensian abbey founded in 1143 in Prague. It is also where M meets Bond and admits: "Christ, I miss the Cold War." The historic library can be visited today.

Visitor guidance: The Strahov library hall is open daily for an admission charge.

Montenegro is a Czech spa town. Bond and Vesper Lynd check into the Hotel Splendide, and the Hotel Splendide is the Grandhotel Pupp, a 228-room luxury hotel in Karlovy Vary; the town also provided the exterior of the casino. The producers chose it because Trieste and the Croatian coastline did not have the large hotels surrounded by big boulevards they wanted. The crew finished the Czech shoot here in May 2006.

Visitor guidance: A working hotel on Mírové náměstí in Karlovy Vary.

Across the Teplá river from the hotel is the casino itself: the old Kaiserbad spa, opened in 1895 and closed in 1994. Here Le Chiffre organises a Texas hold 'em tournament to win back his clients' money, and Vesper, a British Treasury agent, oversees Bond's $10 million buy-in. Bond spots Le Chiffre's tell, then loses his stake when Le Chiffre is tipped off. Director Martin Campbell's challenge was to make ten people around a table playing cards interesting, three times over.

After Le Chiffre's lover Valenka poisons his drink and Vesper rescues him, Bond convalesces at a lakeside sanatorium on Lake Como: the Villa del Balbianello, standing on the tip of a wooded peninsula near the village of Lenno. It is famous for its elaborate terraced gardens, and in 2019 drew more visitors than any of the 52 FAI properties. Film fans may know it already: it was the lake retreat in Star Wars: Attack of the Clones.

Visitor guidance: An FAI property near Lenno; the terraced gardens are the reason to come.

Bond and Vesper reach Venice by yacht, she in a red dress and no extra in the scene dressed in red to catch the eye. Then the film turns. Gunmen take Vesper captive inside a gutted palazzo under restoration on the Grand Canal, held up by large flotation devices, and Bond blows the supports away. The building goes into the water with an elevator cage in it, and she locks the cage door rather than let him rescue her. The canal work was plates shot here with 120 extras in the water; the collapse itself was built at Pinewood on a rig of some 90 metric tons.

Visitor guidance: Campiello del Remer is a public square a short walk north of the Rialto Bridge, opposite the Rialto vegetable market.

The last scene is back on Lake Como, at a faux-medieval villa from the 1920s standing under the Bregagno at Sant'Abbondio. Vesper left Bond her phone and he traces Mr. White to this house, shoots him in the leg to disable him, and introduces himself: "The name's Bond, James Bond." The villa has since been restored and split into five private apartments.