The casino the film is named after has two addresses. The front of it is a spa house in Karlovy Vary that opened in 1895, lost its spa business at the end of the 1980s and was closed to the public and decaying by the time the crew arrived. The poker table where Bond plays Le Chiffre is 7,900 km away, in the small free-standing lobby of a hotel on Paradise Island in the Bahamas.
23
places on the route
Thirteen of the places are Czech, four are in the Bahamas — switch with the buttons above. Click a point to jump to its entry.
Most of the map works like that. The film's Montenegro is Bohemian, its Miami is a Prague runway in January plus ten weeks on a Surrey airfield, the House of Commons is a monastery library, and Uganda is a country park next door to Pinewood. The producers had looked at Trieste and the Croatian coast and found nothing there with big hotels on wide boulevards, so the seaside town came out of a Czech spa and a castle town of three thousand people up the road from it. Some of this you can walk into. The colonnade is open and free, the library and the villa on Lake Como take visitors, and the spa house came out of a four-year restoration in June 2023. The proving ground and the aerodrome do not take visitors, and the house where the film ends is now five private flats.
Bond and Vesper get off a train in Montenegro under a roof carried by 124 Corinthian columns, with twelve allegorical statues of the months standing along the attic above them. It is a drinking hall. Josef Zítek designed it in sandstone between 1871 and 1881, it runs 132 metres along the river Teplá, and it covers five mineral springs, the Mill Spring among them.
The city's own account of the shoot records what dressing it as a station cost the neighbourhood: the whole spa quarter was sealed off, and the crew carried the hot spring water out to the patients past their own barriers.
You can walk through it today for nothing. The drinking cups are sold a few steps away.
The Hotel Splendide, where Bond and Vesper stay. A local account of the shoot lists the parts of the hotel that were used: the car park, the Grand Restaurant, the reception, the lift and the park alongside.
Not the corridor, and not the stairwell where Bond fights Obanno. Those were built at Barrandov in Prague, where Peter Lamont put up more than forty sets on his ninth and last Bond film. The stairwell went four flights up, almost to the roof of the stage, with a corridor hidden behind frosted glass at every level so that the light had somewhere to come from.
The Pupp is a working five-star hotel and it worked twice that year. Last Holiday, also released in 2006, used the same building in a different guise.
Císařské lázně, Mariánskolázeňská 306/2, Karlovy Vary
The Imperial Spa in Karlovy Vary in July 2026, three years after the restoration that ended in June 2023. In the film the building is the Casino Royale.
The Imperial Spa, and on screen the Casino Royale itself. The Vienna studio of Fellner and Helmer drew it, the first guests came on 6 May 1895, and the spa business ended here in the late 1980s. After that the building did occasional duty as a venue, and for a while it worked as a casino, which is what the film asks it to be again.
It was empty and decaying when the crew arrived, and it stayed that way for another thirteen years. Restoration ran from December 2019 to June 2023 and cost 1.4 billion crowns. The covered atrium now holds a concert hall by the architect Petr Hájek: a red steel structure standing on six legs so that it touches none of the historic walls.
Bond walks up through the terraced, statue-filled Versailles Gardens of a Bahamian resort to reach the casino in Montenegro. Then he sits down at the poker table, and the room he is sitting in is this hotel's small free-standing lobby, on the other side of the Atlantic from the building whose front door he has just come through.
The hotel also plays itself. Bond and Vesper stay here in the Bahamian part of the film, in Villa 1085.
One travel piece, written for the BBC in 2012, is the only source we found that puts the casino interior in this lobby. Everything else that records the production on Paradise Island stops short of naming a building.
Náměstí T. G. Masaryka, Loket
The square at Loket, with the town hall on the left and the Holy Trinity column in the middle. In the film the square is a Montenegrin seaside town and the terrace outside these houses is a garden restaurant.
A town of three thousand under a castle, ten kilometres west of Karlovy Vary, playing a Montenegrin seaside resort. The square became a garden restaurant. The local account has the crew there on 15, 16 and 17 May 2006: an aerial shot to introduce the town, the Aston Martin coming up from the lower end of the square, the arrest on the terrace, police Škoda Octavias arriving fast. It is the one source for the dates and for the shots, and the same page says Daniel Craig stayed in the Hotel Goethe, in room 7.
The town was called Elbogen when the postcard printers photographed the square in 1911. The town hall, the Holy Trinity column in the middle and the gabled houses along the sides are the ones the camera crew found in 2006.
The Aston Martin will not roll. Its centre of gravity is too low, and the stunt needs it to go over on a road where Bond swerves to miss Vesper. So an 18-inch ramp went down on the tarmac at a vehicle testing ground in Bedfordshire, and an air cannon went in behind the driver's seat, fired by Adam Kirley at the moment the wheels hit. The car turned seven times at more than 70 mph. In November 2006 the Guinness Book of Records logged it as a world record.
It is a private testing site, closed to visitors, and no source we have says which of its roads it was.
Miami: a Prague winter and ten weeks in Surrey
Ministry of Transport, nábřeží Ludvíka Svobody 1222/12, Prague
The Ministry of Transport on the Vltava embankment. Its outside is the Miami building that holds the Body Worlds exhibition.
The building that holds the Body Worlds exhibition in Miami is a working government ministry on the Vltava embankment, and only its outside is in the film. It takes period work constantly: Hellboy used it, so did the series We Children from Bahnhof Zoo, and a run of Czech productions before and since.
The nuclear shelter underneath it can be visited on the ministry's open days.
National Memorial on Vítkov Hill, Prague
The National Memorial on Vítkov hill, built 1929–1933. The Body Worlds interior was shot inside.
Inside the memorial: the columbarium, lit by bronze candelabra. The building held the mausoleum of the communist president Klement Gottwald between 1954 and 1962.
Inside that Miami exhibition, Bond kills Dimitrios among the plastinated bodies, and the room is a functionalist memorial on a hill in Žižkov, built between 1929 and 1933 to Jan Zázvorka's design. Between 1954 and 1962 it held the embalmed body of the communist president Klement Gottwald, which is why accounts of this scene call the location a Prague mausoleum.
Two of the real Body Worlds plastinates in the scene are the Poker Playing Trio, sitting at a card table in a film about a card game, and Rearing Horse and Rider. Gunther von Hagens, who makes them, appears in the scene himself; all you see of him is his hat.
The memorial belongs to the National Museum now. The permanent exhibition, the roof terrace and Gottwald's laboratory are open.
Miami International, shot in the middle of the Czech winter. The extras turned up in fur boots and heavy parkas and had to strip down to shorts, sandals and T-shirts to pass for tourists in Florida.
The floodlights at Prague are daylight blue with a faint green in them. Phil Méheux, who photographed the film, decided to fill in around them with HMI light rather than fight them.
The Skyfleet S570 model on show at the National Motor Museum at Beaulieu in 2012. The exhibition label says the live sequence was filmed at Dunsfold with a disused Boeing 747, and this model did the shots in which the aircraft moves.
Photo: Karen Roe from Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, UK · CC BY 2.0 · Wikimedia Commons
The rest of Miami airport, and ten weeks of it: the fuel tanker going through a line of vehicles, the aircraft, the chase. When the unit moved here from Prague, the art department put up extra lighting towers and the production bought about thirty floodlights of the same kind as the ones at the Czech airport, so the two halves of one sequence would cut together.
The Skyfleet S570 was a real aeroplane: a retired British Airways Boeing 747-200, registration G-BDXJ, named City of Birmingham, bought by a company that supplies aircraft to film crews and modified on the ground here. An exhibition label written for the National Motor Museum splits the work exactly. The live sequence at Dunsfold used the 747. Every shot in which the Skyfleet moves is a model, filmed on a miniature set at Pinewood by Steve Begg's unit.
The runway is a business park and a filming base, not open ground. British readers know it as the Top Gear track; Batman Begins, The Da Vinci Code and World War Z all worked here too.
Prague as London, Prague as Venice
Strahov Library, Strahovské nádvoří 1/132, Prague
The Theological Hall of the Strahov library. The monastery library stands in for a committee room of the House of Commons when M meets Bond.
M meets Bond in a committee room of the House of Commons, and the room is the library of a Premonstratensian monastery above Prague, shelves of leather-bound books under a painted vault, wooden globes standing along the floor. Both historic halls are open to visitors, though you look into them from the doorway rather than walk through.
Bond and Vesper check into a hotel in Venice and the lobby is at the top of Wenceslas Square: the staircase hall of the National Museum, twin marble stairs with red carpet running up either side of a bronze figure, arcades and painted lunettes behind. The exteriors of that arrival were shot on the water in Venice. The interior never left the Czech Republic. The museum spent years closed for reconstruction after the film and has since reopened.
Named, and nothing more
Danube House, Karolinská 650/1, Prague
Danube House in Karlín, completed in 2003 on the site of Prague's old river port. The Czech Film Commission lists it among the film's locations.
The Czech Film Commission, a state body, lists Danube House among the film's Prague locations and says nothing further. It is a low-energy office block finished in 2003 on Rohanský Island, shaped like a ship, the triangular plot ending at the west like a keel, on the site of Prague's old river port. The architects took the shape from the Chilehaus in Hamburg. The glazed atrium with its cafés and shops is open to anyone.
There is a second statement that may or may not belong to this building. The film opens in black and white in Dryden's office, and the account of the photography places that room in an office building on the bank of the Vltava. Danube House stands on the bank of the Vltava. No source we read puts those two sentences together, and the fan sites that do also credit the building to the architect of the block next door.
The same state commission lists the main railway station, and again names no scene. The station platform in the finished film is 110 km west of here, under the columns of a drinking colonnade.
Podbaba, Prague 6
Podbaba, on the Vltava in Prague 6. The Czech Film Commission lists it among the film's locations and says nothing more.
Planá u Mariánských Lázní seen across the fields. The crew worked here in the spring of 2006; one local account says the scenes were shot in the closed hospital and never used.
In February 2006, before a frame was shot, the Czech co-producer named the towns the production would work in: Prague, Karlovy Vary, Planá, Loket. The crew did come here in the spring.
What they did is thinner. One local page, illustrated with press photographs from the set, says they worked in the town's long-closed hospital, and says in the same breath that none of it reached the screen. Nothing else we found mentions either the building or the scenes. The coordinate on the map is the town, not the hospital.
Madagascar is a building site in Nassau
The former Buena Vista Hotel, Delancy Street, Nassau
The parkour chase ends at the Madagascan embassy, where Bond takes Mollaka. The yellow mansion out front is the closed Buena Vista Hotel on Delancy Street in Nassau. Inside is Prague: that embassy interior was the first scene of the whole production, shot at Modřany Studios on 30 January 2006, before anyone went anywhere.
The chase itself runs across a building site, and the site was the grounds of a derelict hotel that Michael G. Wilson had known since he shot The Spy Who Loved Me there in 1977. Two 100-foot cranes and a mobile crane came over from Britain because every crane in the United States was busy rebuilding New Orleans. A section of concrete wall was cut out and reinforced with steel so the digger could go through it. Nothing we could check names the hotel. The aggregator sites name it without hesitation.
A rum distillery works today out of the Buena Vista Estate at 17 Delancy Street, established 1789, free tours daily. Its own website never mentions the film, and no source we have says the estate and the hotel are the same house. They carry the same name on the same short street.
A pink colonial mansion 25 km from Nassau, on screen as the home of the villain Dimitrios. Before the film it belonged to Jean Chalopin, who created the cartoon Inspector Gadget; by 2006 it had been bought by the golfers Ernie Els and Tiger Woods, and a press item from June that year notes that the crew got in shortly before a large modernisation began.
That modernisation happened. Albany is a private residential resort now, its hotel open to the public, and you can eat inside the mansion at the restaurant there.
Bond walks out of the sea, in the shot that answers Ursula Andress coming out of the water in Dr. No. One travel piece names this beach. Nothing else we found narrows the place down past the settlement.
Mbale, Uganda, filmed on 4 July 2006 in a Buckinghamshire country park a mile and a half from the Pinewood gate. The same trees did the same trick for Goldfinger in 1964, when they were a Swiss road at night with the DB5 on it, and for a run of Hammer horror films, when they were Transylvania.
It is a public park with a car park, a lake and waymarked trails, and it is the easiest place on this page to stand in.
Bond is brought here to recover after Le Chiffre has finished with him, and here he writes the letter resigning from the service. Late May and early June 2006, on the stone terraces above Lake Como.
The villa belongs to FAI, the Italian national trust, which writes in its own material about the film turning the house into a clinic in the greenery. The identification comes from the owners. A Franciscan monastery stood on the tip of this peninsula from the 13th century, and the two towers on the property are what is left of its church. Cardinal Angelo Maria Durini bought the site in 1785 and made a villa out of it two years later. In 1974 it passed to Guido Monzino, who led the first Italian expedition up Everest; after the Red Brigades murdered Aldo Moro in 1978, Monzino had hidden passages built to link parts of the property. He left the house to FAI when he died in 1988.
It is the most visited of the trust's 52 properties, with more than 135,000 people through it in 2019. You reach it by boat from Lenno or on foot along the lake path. The same terraces are Naboo in Attack of the Clones, where Anakin and Padmé marry, four years before Bond convalesces on them.
The Villa La Gaeta estate on its promontory at San Siro, Lake Como, built for the Ambrosoli heirs by the brothers Gino and Adolfo Coppedè and finished in 1921. Bond finds Mr White here in the last scene of the film.
Bond tracks down Mr White, shoots him in the leg and introduces himself. That is the end of the picture.
The house is a castellated pile on its own promontory, built for the heirs of Solone Ambrosoli, a numismatist, by the brothers Gino and Adolfo Coppedè, finished in 1921. The Gerli counts bought it in 1940. A careful restoration in 2011 turned the estate into five private apartments, using both the main house and the south-facing dépendance left from the older property, and in July 2026 one of the five went on the market at about €1.45 million, which put the place back in the Italian papers. Four thousand square metres of park, a private beach, a jetty, a small marina basin, and no public access at all.
Daniel Craig on the yacht Spirit in Venice during a break in filming, 8 June 2006. The boat's name is legible on the furled sail; she was demasted to pass under the Venetian bridges.
Five days of exteriors, between Prague and Pinewood. On screen Venice is Venice.
Bond and Vesper come up the canal on a 54-foot sailing yacht called Spirit, built in Suffolk, which had to have her mast taken out to pass under the Venetian bridges. Her builders say she was the first sailing boat to go up the Grand Canal in three hundred years. The run on screen is the stretch between the Accademia and the Rialto.
Then the house sinks, and the house is not in Venice. The interiors and the moving rig were at Pinewood, and the outside of it was a model a third of the size, 25 feet tall, dropped into the tank there and lit to match the weather on the day the crew shot the plates on the canal, with 120 extras watching from the banks and bubbles worked up in the water.
Which Venetian front the model was wearing is the thing we could not settle. One travel piece names a palazzo on the San Polo bank and calls it seventeenth-century in the same sentence, when that building went up around 1500. Nobody from the production names a Venetian building at all. The casino at the top of this page has two addresses. The house that sinks has none we could establish.
