Roger Moore played James Bond seven times between 1973 and 1985 and established a version of the character that prioritised wit over menace, spectacle over realism and the raising of a single eyebrow over almost everything else. The Moore era Bond films used their locations with a particular kind of confident showmanship — placing Bond against the most recognisable landmarks in the world and letting the combination do the work. The Pyramids. The Carnival. The canal boat chase through a Thai market. These were not subtle choices. They were the right choices.
Four of the Moore era's most memorable locations — Egypt, Italy, Thailand and Brazil — are covered in this guide.
Location 01The Pyramids of Giza — The Spy Who Loved Me (1977)
The Spy Who Loved Me used the Pyramids of Giza and the adjacent Sphinx as the backdrop for Bond's meeting with his Egyptian contact and the film's Cairo sequences. The Pyramids were used in a way that felt entirely natural to the film's scale — as a setting for a conversation between a spy and an informant that carries the implication that the fate of the world is being discussed against one of the greatest architectural achievements in human history. Which it is. Because it is a Bond film.
The Pyramids at Giza — the Great Pyramid of Khufu, the Pyramid of Khafre and the Pyramid of Menkaure — are on the western edge of Cairo at Giza Plateau. The Great Pyramid is the only surviving wonder of the ancient world. The Sphinx sits immediately east of the second pyramid. The entire complex is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and receives over fifteen million visitors a year. Bond is not the main attraction here. Bond is one of many good reasons to come.
The sound and light show held at the Giza Plateau every evening — which uses the pyramids and sphinx as the canvas for a narrated projection show covering ancient Egyptian history — gives you the location in a cinematic register that the Bond film understood intuitively. Going at sunset, watching the light change on the stone, is the closest you can get to the atmosphere that Lewis Gilbert's camera captured in 1976 during production.
🇪🇬 Egypt — book it
Location 02Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy — For Your Eyes Only (1981)
For Your Eyes Only used the Dolomites resort town of Cortina d'Ampezzo in northern Italy for its opening ski chase sequence — Bond pursued down the slopes by assassins in a sequence that remains one of the franchise's best action set pieces. Cortina was already internationally known as a winter resort and the host of the 1956 Winter Olympics. The Bond film added it to the franchise's geographical vocabulary in a way that has made it a regular Bond location reference ever since.
Cortina d'Ampezzo is in the Veneto, about two and a half hours north of Venice. The town sits in a valley surrounded by the Dolomites — a UNESCO World Heritage Site — and operates as both a summer hiking destination and a winter ski resort. The ski runs that feature in the film are the same ones that operate today. The town itself is one of the more beautiful mountain resorts in the Alps, with an elegance that reflects its long history as a destination for European aristocracy and its role in the 1956 Olympics.
🇮🇹 Cortina d'Ampezzo — book it
Location 03Khao Phing Kan, Thailand — The Man with the Golden Gun (1974)
The Man with the Golden Gun used Khao Phing Kan — a dramatic limestone karst island in Phang Nga Bay in southern Thailand — as the lair of Scaramanga, the world's greatest assassin. The island's twin limestone towers rising from the sea, one of them perforated at its base with a hole large enough to sail a boat through, created one of the franchise's most distinctive visual locations. The island is now almost universally called James Bond Island by Thai tour operators and has been since shortly after the film's release in 1974.
James Bond Island is accessible by boat from Phuket or Krabi, a journey of approximately two hours. It is one of the most visited tourist sites in Thailand and the experience of arriving by longtail boat through the limestone formations of Phang Nga Bay is spectacular regardless of any Bond context. The island itself is small and the crowds are significant during peak season. Going in the early morning — before the tour boats from Phuket arrive in force — gives you the location at its least crowded and most cinematic.
The bay surrounding James Bond Island is part of a national park and the limestone formations extend for miles in each direction. A full-day boat tour of Phang Nga Bay — covering the cave formations, the sea caves accessible only at low tide and the floating Muslim fishing village of Ko Panyi — is one of the most impressive natural landscape experiences in Southeast Asia. James Bond Island is one stop on a route that justifies the day entirely on its own merits.
Location 04Rio de Janeiro — Moonraker (1979)
Moonraker sent Bond to Rio de Janeiro for the film's Brazilian sequence, which includes a cable car fight on the Sugarloaf Mountain cable car — one of the more vertigo-inducing action sequences in the franchise — and the Carnival sequence that used Rio's actual carnival as background to a chase. Moonraker is not the most critically regarded Bond film. The cable car sequence is still genuinely exciting. The Rio locations remain spectacular.
Sugarloaf Mountain — Pão de Açúcar — is at the eastern end of the Urca neighbourhood in Rio, accessible by cable car from the Praia Vermelha terminal at the base. The cable car journey runs in two stages — to the intermediate Morro da Urca and then to the summit of Sugarloaf at 396 metres above the bay. The view from the summit — Guanabara Bay, the city, the Christ the Redeemer statue on Corcovado to the west — is one of the great urban views in the world. The cable car that features in the film has been replaced by modern cars, but the route is the same and the experience of arriving at the summit platform where Roger Moore and Jaws fought is exactly as dramatic as the film suggests.
Carnival — Rio's Carnival is held annually in the days before Ash Wednesday, typically in February. The film used real Carnival footage and the festival's scale and energy is impossible to fabricate. Attending Rio Carnival is one of the more overwhelming sensory experiences available on earth. It is extremely crowded, extremely loud and extremely colourful. It is the exact opposite of quiet and it is absolutely worth doing at least once, Bond film or not.
Planning Your Moore Era Bond Tour
- Giza Plateau, Cairo — UNESCO World Heritage Site. Visit at sunset or for the evening sound and light show. Fly into Cairo International.
- Cortina d'Ampezzo — Veneto, Italy. Summer or winter visits. 2.5 hours from Venice by car. Ski passes available for the Bond film pistes.
- James Bond Island, Phang Nga Bay — day tour from Phuket or Krabi. Go early to beat the crowds. Fly into Phuket International or Krabi Airport.
- Sugarloaf Mountain, Rio de Janeiro — cable car from Praia Vermelha. Open daily. Book tickets at bondosucares.com.br or on site.
- Rio Carnival — February each year. Book accommodation and Sambadrome tickets at least six months in advance. Prices increase significantly as the event approaches.
The Moore Era Legacy
Roger Moore's Bond era polarises opinion in a way that the other eras do not. The films are lighter, more self-consciously comic and less concerned with internal realism than the Connery films that preceded them or the Craig films that eventually followed. What they do share with both is the commitment to locations that are unmistakably themselves — the Pyramids could not be anything other than the Pyramids; Sugarloaf could not be anything other than Sugarloaf; James Bond Island is now so definitively James Bond Island that its original name is largely forgotten. The Moore era understood that the right landscape, properly used, does a significant portion of the work for you. The eyebrow does the rest.