Film & TV · James Bond
Spectre filming locations
Spectre (2015) was filmed at 37 places in 6 countries: Italy (17), United Kingdom (7), Austria (6), Mexico (3), Morocco (3), Vatican City (1). Each one below is written up with what was shot there.
Italy 17 locations
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Photo: Anil Öztas · CC BY 4.0 Rome
Roma, Italy
In Spectre (2015), James Bond follows a lead to Rome, attending the funeral of the assassin Sciarra and then infiltrating a midnight meeting of the SPECTRE organisation in a darkened palazzo. The sequence ends in a car chase along the Tiber embankments, Bond's Aston Martin DB10 against a Jaguar C-X75, weaving through the deserted night-time city beside the river. The DB10 was built specially for the film, only ten were made & the chase was shot on location on the real Lungotevere roads.
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Photo: Anil Öztas · CC BY 4.0 Colosseum
Roma, Italy
In Spectre (2015), James Bond drives through the centre of ancient Rome on his way to a mob funeral, the Aston Martin DB10 sweeping along Via di San Gregorio past the Arch of Constantine and the floodlit Colosseum. The later night chase with Hinx's Jaguar C-X75 threads the same district before crossing the Tiber. The amphitheatre is backdrop rather than set piece, but it places the sequence instantly: this is Rome, at night, at speed.
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Photo: Darafsh · CC BY-SA 3.0 Piazza San Pietro
Roma, Italy
Spectre took the rare step of running a car chase through St Peter's Square, with Bond's Aston Martin DB10 and Hinx's Jaguar C-X75 speeding across the piazza and diving down the street to the right of Bernini's colonnade on their way to the Tiber. The cars come in from Via S. Pio X to the south and carry straight on into Via della Conciliazione, which makes the square a hinge in the chase route rather than a backdrop. Few films have put vehicles at speed inside the colonnade's embrace.
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Photo: Livioandronico2013 · CC BY-SA 4.0 Via Appia
Roma, Italy
Spectre placed Lucia Sciarra's home on the Via Appia Antica, at the Villa di Fiorano behind the ancient road's walls & it is here that Bond follows the widow after her husband's funeral and kills the two Spectre gunmen sent to silence her. The scene is the film's pivot: Lucia names the organisation and gives Bond the time and place of its meeting. The property, listed in location guides at Via Appia Antica 400 and also known as Villa Alberico, supplied the house that stands in for the Sciarra residence.
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Photo: NormanB · CC BY-SA 3.0 Passetto di Borgo
Roma, Italy
The Passetto di Borgo appeared as a filming location in Spectre (2015, dir. Sam Mendes), the Bond film in which 007 attends a Spectre organisation meeting in Rome. The production used the Passetto and the surrounding Borgo district as exterior Roman locations; the corridor's ancient stone walls and elevated position above street level provided atmosphere for the Rome sequences.
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Photo: Dankayes · CC BY-SA 4.0 Ponte Sisto
Roma, Italy
The fifteenth-century Ponte Sisto is where Spectre disposes of its most expensive prop, Bond aiming the battered Aston Martin DB10 off the towpath into the Tiber before stepping out and adjusting his cuffs. The car arrives here after the descent of the Scalo de Pinedo steps, closing the chase at the bridge that carries Via dei Pettinari across to Trastevere. Because neither the DB10 nor Hinx's Jaguar C-X75 was a production model with factory spares, eight Astons and seven Jaguars were kept running across the Rome shoot.
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Photo: Jorge Franganillo · CC BY 2.0 Via della Conciliazione
Roma, Italy
Via della Conciliazione gives Spectre's Rome chase its longest clear run, the wide avenue driven through the Borgo to the Vatican now carrying Bond's Aston Martin DB10 and Hinx's Jaguar C-X75 down from St Peter's toward the Tiber. The straight let the unit build real speed between the tighter Borgo alleys and the riverbank & it is on this stretch that Hinx closes to ramming distance. The cars enter from Piazza San Pietro and carry on to the river, making the avenue the spine of the whole Vatican section.
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Photo: Ryan Hodnett · CC BY-SA 4.0 Fontana dell'Acqua Paola
Roma, Italy
The great baroque fountain on the Janiculum ridge marks one of the chase's set-piece turns, with Bond's Aston Martin DB10 and the pursuing Jaguar C-X75 swinging around the Fontana dell'Acqua Paola before dropping down Via Garibaldi toward the river. Its wide forecourt was one of the few open spaces high above the centre where the unit could stage a full circling manoeuvre & the fountain's illuminated facade reads clearly in the night photography that carries the whole Rome sequence.
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Photo: Chabe01 · CC BY-SA 4.0 Porta San Pancrazio
Roma, Italy
The gate now housing the Garibaldi Museum is the grand arch through which Bond's Aston Martin DB10 is seen driving as he arrives for Marco Sciarra's funeral, one of the earliest Rome shots in the sequence. The unit worked the surrounding Via Garibaldi on the Janiculum for the chase as well, with the Fontana dell'Acqua Paola a short way down the ridge. Porta San Pancrazio's single high opening framed the DB10 cleanly at speed, which is why the shot reads as a deliberate entrance rather than as passing traffic.
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Photo: Lalupa · CC BY-SA 4.0 corso Vittorio Emanuele II
Roma, Italy
Once clear of the Vatican, Spectre's Rome chase opens out onto Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, the broad nineteenth-century cut driven through the medieval centre that let the unit run the Aston Martin DB10 and the Jaguar C-X75 at speed where the surrounding lanes could not. The sequence uses the boulevard and the adjoining Piazza della Cancelleria as its acceleration stretch, bridging the cramped Borgo alleys and the run down to the Tiber. Rome granted the production three weeks of rolling closures to assemble the chase in February and March 2015.
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Photo: Chabe01 · CC BY-SA 4.0 Piazza Trilussa
Roma, Italy
Piazza Trilussa hosted the chase's punchline, the moment Bond puts the wrecked Aston Martin DB10 into the Tiber and walks away in black tie. The square at the Trastevere end of Ponte Sisto was closed for three days so the unit could work the riverside stretch, with two large cranes stationed in the piazza to lift the stunt cars back out of the water between takes. It is the last Rome location in the sequence, ending three weeks of rolling closures across the city with the DB10 sinking below the parapet.
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Photo: Thomas Woodtli from Zürich, Switzerland · CC BY-SA 2.0 Via Panisperna
Roma, Italy
Via Panisperna supplied the Monti district leg of Spectre's Rome chase, a steep and kinked street on the Viminal that let the sequence change texture between the open sweep of Corso Vittorio Emanuele II and the alley work near the Vatican. The Aston Martin DB10 and the Jaguar C-X75 were run through it during the February and March 2015 night shoots, when the production held rolling closures across central Rome for three weeks to build a chase that crosses the whole city rather than staying in one quarter.
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Photo: Nemo bis · CC BY-SA 3.0 EUR
Roma, Italy
Marco Sciarra's funeral, the scene that puts Bond beside Lucia Sciarra and sets Spectre's plot moving, was staged in the EUR quarter rather than in a working Roman cemetery. The production had looked at the Verano cemetery before relocating the sequence to this Mussolini-era district south of the centre, whose severe travertine colonnades gave the film a mourning ground with no visible modern Rome in frame. The same quarter's Fascist-era architecture supplies Spectre's cold, monumental reading of the city before the car chase turns it frantic.
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Photo: Francisco Anzola from United States · CC BY 2.0 Museo della Civiltà Romana
Roma, Italy
The colonnaded entrance of the Museo della Civilta Romana stood in for the cemetery where Marco Sciarra is buried, the funeral at which Bond first sees the widow Lucia and is marked by Spectre's watchers. Built between 1939 and 1941 as part of Mussolini's planned world exhibition, the museum's rows of square travertine piers gave the production a mausoleum-scale backdrop that needed no dressing to read as a tomb. Bond watches the service from among the columns before following Lucia home to the Via Appia Antica.
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Photo: Dietmar Rabich · CC BY-SA 4.0 River Tiber
Viterbo, Italy
The Tiber carries the closing third of Spectre's Rome chase, both cars dropping off the street grid and running along the river's towpaths after the Aston Martin DB10 takes the Scalo de Pinedo steps down to the water. The riverside was the only continuous stretch in central Rome long enough to sustain the speeds the sequence needed & it ends with Bond steering the DB10 over the edge at Ponte Sisto and letting it sink. Cranes worked the bank between takes to lift the stunt cars clear of the water.
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Photo: 1municipio · CC BY-SA 4.0 Via Nomentana
Roma, Italy
Via Nomentana carried the chase's approach into Rome from the north and required what the location department called one of the longest city lock-offs it had ever arranged, roughly three kilometres of multi-lane main road closed to traffic. The Aston Martin DB10 and Jaguar C-X75 run in along the avenue before turning off into the much smaller Via Reggio Emilia, the cut that drops the sequence from open road into tight street work. The scale of that closure set the tone for three weeks of shutdowns across the city.
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Photo: Lalupa · CC BY-SA 3.0 Scalo De Pinedo
Roma, Italy
The riverside steps at Scalo de Pinedo take the chase off the streets and down onto the Tiber towpath & preparing them was among the sequence's most involved engineering jobs. The art department laid concrete wedges dressed to look like cobbles so the Aston Martin DB10 could take the descent at speed & clad the flanking walls in steel painted to resemble concrete to protect them from the DB10's rear-mounted flamethrower. Bond triggers that weapon here against Hinx's pursuing Jaguar C-X75.
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United Kingdom 7 locations
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Photo: DeFacto · CC BY-SA 4.0 Blenheim Palace
Oxfordshire, United Kingdom
In the 2015 James Bond film Spectre, the Great Court of Blenheim Palace stands in for the Roman palazzo where the criminal organisation SPECTRE holds its secret meeting. Bond arrives in his Aston Martin DB10, is recognised & escapes by roaring out through the palace's narrow stone archways, chased by a henchman in a Jaguar, the start of a night-time car chase along the Tiber. The palace's east courtyard provided both the dramatic entrance and the getaway, its baroque grandeur lending the scene its menace.
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Photo: Ввласенко · CC BY-SA 3.0 Vauxhall Bridge
Wandsworth, United Kingdom
Vauxhall Bridge sits at the upstream end of Spectre's Thames sequences, the span the boat passes as Bond and Bill Tanner go downriver to view the wrecked SIS building. Much of Westminster including this bridge was closed on 17 May 2015 for the powerboat and helicopter chase, with around 150 people marshalling crowds and traffic while the unit worked the arches from barges. The bridge's proximity to Vauxhall Cross let the production shoot the ruined headquarters and the chase from the same river position.
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Photo: Fred Romero from Paris, France · CC BY 2.0 SIS Building
Lambeth, United Kingdom
Vauxhall Cross appears in Spectre as a ruin, the SIS building still carrying the damage inflicted in Skyfall and standing derelict while C moves to wind the service up. Bond and Bill Tanner take a boat downriver specifically to look at it & the film later has the condemned block demolished outright. Spotlights were rigged around the real building for the night shooting so it would read clearly against the water & the practical frontage was combined with digital work to sell its destruction.
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Photo: Ewan-M · CC BY-SA 2.0 Rules
Westminster, United Kingdom
Rules appears in Spectre (2015) when James Bond (Daniel Craig) takes Dr. Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux) to dinner at the restaurant during the London sequence of the film. The scene uses the actual ground-floor dining room of Rules at 35 Maiden Lane, Covent Garden. The restaurant's Victorian décor, red walls, oil paintings, game trophies, required no dressing; it was filmed as found. Rules is London's oldest restaurant (est. 1798) and has also appeared in the fiction of Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh & John Mortimer.
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Photo: Oscar Taylor · CC BY-SA 2.0 Woodstock
Oxfordshire, United Kingdom
Blenheim Palace at Woodstock plays Rome in Spectre, its Great Court standing in for the exterior of the Palazzo Cadenza where the organisation holds the night meeting Bond infiltrates and where Franz Oberhauser names him from the head of the table. The arrival of the delegates' cars and Bond's departure into the chase were both shot in the courtyard, while the meeting room itself was built and filmed at Pinewood. The palace's baroque scale let an English country house pass convincingly for a Roman palazzo.
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Photo: Charles from Port Chester, New York · CC BY 2.0 City Hall
Southwark, United Kingdom
London City Hall supplied the interiors of the Centre for National Security, C's glass-walled surveillance headquarters that absorbs MI6 in Spectre. The building's helical ramp and curved atrium give the fictional agency its cold transparency & the confrontation between M and C was staged on those spiralling walkways. Norman Foster's structure was completed in 2002 & its interior geometry needed no set dressing to read as the command centre of a service built on total data collection.
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Photo: Colin Smith · CC BY-SA 2.0 Drummonds
Westminster, United Kingdom
The Drummonds bank building off The Mall provided the MI6 safe house code-named Hildebrand, where Bond takes Madeleine Swann under guard after the Alpine escape and where Q works on the Spectre ring. The production used the building's side entrance on Spring Gardens for the comings and goings, including Bond's departure and Swann's decision to walk out rather than continue into the operation. The address sits a short walk from Whitehall, keeping the safe house inside the film's tight Westminster geography.
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Austria 6 locations
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Photo: Peter Leiter · CC BY-SA 3.0 Kartitsch
Tirol, Austria
Kartitsch, the municipality neighbouring Obertilliach, took the vehicle half of Spectre's Alpine chase, filmed there across at least three days in early 2015. The production laid a dedicated parking area in the village to hold the fleet used in the sequence & the shooting involved skidoos and piste-bashers alongside the Range Rovers pursuing Madeleine Swann. The light aircraft flown for the chase were brought into East Tyrol for this stretch of the schedule, letting the sequence cut between air and snow without relocating.
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Photo: Carsten Steger · CC BY-SA 4.0 Altausseer See
Steiermark, Austria
Lake Altaussee is the mountain-ringed water Bond crosses by boat to reach Mr White's hideout, filmed in the opening days of Spectre's principal photography on 5 and 6 January 2015. Daniel Craig was shot gliding across the dark winter lake in a traditional Salzkammergut Plaette, the flat-bottomed timber craft used locally, rather than in any powered boat. The production worked three sites around the lake in all: the winding approach road, the open water & the log cabin standing on the far shore.
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Photo: FkMohr · CC BY-SA 3.0 de Gaislachkogel
Tirol, Austria
The summit of the Gaislachkogl provided Spectre with the Hoffler Klinik, the glass-walled Alpine clinic where Bond finds Madeleine Swann working as a doctor. The building is the ice Q restaurant, standing at 3,048 metres and described by the production as a design restaurant shaped like a giant ice cube, a form that delivered a modernist facility without a set being built. The cable car station below, all curved ribs of steel, appears in the approach & the clinic's isolation drives the abduction that follows.
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Photo: Whgler · CC BY-SA 3.0 Ötztal Alps
Tirol, Austria
The Oetztal Alps carry Spectre's aeroplane-versus-convoy chase, staged along the glacier road that climbs beside the pistes and ranks among the highest paved roads in the Alps. Roughly forty-five Range Rovers and two Britten-Norman Islander light aircraft were run through the sequence, with Bond flying one of the planes down onto the road after Madeleine Swann's abductors. Filming ran through January and February 2015, when about five hundred cast and crew were based in the valley below.
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Photo: Bernhard Holub · CC BY-SA 4.0 Jagdhaus Seewiese
Steiermark, Austria
Jagdhaus Seewiese, a former hunting lodge on the meadow at the far end of Lake Altaussee, played Mr White's remote log cabin, the hideout where Bond finds him dying of thallium poisoning and extracts the lead to Madeleine Swann. It was the very first location filmed anywhere for Spectre, shot on 5 and 6 January 2015 with Daniel Craig and Sam Mendes present, two days of exterior work that open the film's Austrian act. Only the outside was used: every interior in the scene was built and shot at Pinewood.
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Photo: Thoodor (talk) · CC BY-SA 3.0 at Obertilliach
Tirol, Austria
Obertilliach supplied the destruction beat of Spectre's Alpine chase, the moment the Britten-Norman Islander that Bond is flying tears through a wooden barn at ground level. The barn was not a village building: it was transported in from Styria and re-erected for the shot & around ten huts in total were moved or newly built in and around the village to be wrecked on camera. One traditional mountain hut was dismantled and reassembled on the Golzentipp ski slopes, with four separate Obertilliach locations appearing in the film.
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Mexico 3 locations
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Photo: Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 4.0 Mexico City
Distrito Federal, Mexico
Spectre (2015) opens with James Bond walking through a Day of the Dead parade in the Centro Historico, a single long take that sweeps across the Zocalo before a building collapses and a helicopter fight plays out over the square. The production filmed for weeks in central Mexico City in early 2015. The twist: the city had no such parade. The film invented it & the spectacle proved so popular that Mexico City staged its first real Dia de Muertos parade in 2016, now an annual event drawing hundreds of thousands.
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Photo: ProtoplasmaKid · CC BY-SA 4.0 Palenque
Chiapas, Mexico
Spectre, the 2015 James Bond film, opens with a long single-take sequence through a Day of the Dead parade in Mexico City that ends in a brawl aboard a spinning helicopter. The most dangerous of those aerial manoeuvres were not flown over the city at all. A second unit moved to Palenque in Chiapas, using the airfield and open country near the ruins, where the stunt pilot Chuck Aaron could throw the helicopter through rolls and dives with empty ground below. The jungle and airstrip around the Maya site stood in, off camera, for the skies above the capital.
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Photo: Juan Carlos Fonseca Mata · CC BY-SA 4.0 Museo Nacional de Arte
Distrito Federal, Mexico
The Day of the Dead parade that opens Spectre was staged along Calle Tacuba directly in front of the Museo Nacional de Arte, whose facade anchors the wide shots as the skull-masked crowd moves through. The museum sits among a run of landmarks visible in the sequence, including the Palacio de Mineria, the Post Office building and the Museo del Telegrafo. No such parade existed in Mexico City when the scene was invented for the film; the city launched a real one in October 2016, modelled on what the production had staged here.
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Morocco 3 locations
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Photo: Joaoleitao at English Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 3.0 Erfoud
Meknès - Tafilalet, Morocco
The horseshoe rock formation of Gara Medouar, southwest of Erfoud, stands in for the meteorite crater housing Franz Oberhauser's desert facility, the compound where Bond and Madeleine Swann are taken and where Blofeld's identity is finally put to them. The lair was a digital and studio construction composited into the natural formation, which was in fact carved by erosion rather than by any impact. The production also built a desert railway halt in the Erfoud area for the stop where the pair are met and driven onward.
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Photo: H.alhajji · CC BY-SA 4.0 Tangier
Tangier-Tetouan-Al Hoceima, Morocco
Location filming in and around Tangier stood in for Soviet-controlled Afghanistan in The Living Daylights, including the film's final act involving arms smuggling across the Moroccan desert. Dalton's Bond pursues a defecting KGB general through landscapes that local production crews knew how to make read as Central Asian.
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Photo: Farajiibrahim · CC BY-SA 4.0 Oujda
Oriental, Morocco
Oujda is where Spectre's desert railway sequence begins, the train carrying Bond and Madeleine Swann toward Oberhauser's lair being the real Oriental Desert Express service that runs from the city out to Bouarfa. Exterior shots of the train were filmed northeast of Oujda with the city and its mountains behind & the boarding scenes were staged at Beni Oukil station some sixteen kilometres outside town. The carriages hold the film's dinner scene and the brutal fight in which Hinx is thrown from the train.
Vatican City 1 location
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Photo: Nan Palmero from San Antonio, TX, USA · CC BY 2.0 St. Peter's Basilica
Roma, Vatican City
The Rome car chase in Spectre (2015) races down the Lungotevere, the road that hugs the Tiber, with Vatican City and the floodlit dome of St Peter's standing on the night skyline across the water. Bond's Aston Martin DB10 and a pursuing Jaguar tear past Castel Sant'Angelo, the round papal fortress that guards the approach to the Vatican, before the chase ends with a car going into the river. The basilica itself stays a backdrop, the unmistakable shape that tells viewers in one frame that this is Rome.
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