As our gondola ascends to a high Alpine peak, above the waterfalls and lonely mountain goats, there appears to be no 7-foot-tall James Bond villain waiting to snap the cable with his steel teeth.
No, that’s a scene from the 1979 film Moonraker, where a menacing bad guy named Jaws battles with Roger Moore’s character high above Rio de Janeiro. But you can’t blame me for being in a Bond state of mind. Here in the Alps, among majestic snowy mountains, the gondola lift is heading to the world’s leading pilgrimage site for Bond fans: a peak known as the Schilthorn. It was the lair of Bond supervillain Ernst Blofeld in 1969’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.
More than three million visitors came here last year—most, presumably, for the Alpine views. In a quirk of marketing, Switzerland’s peaks compete against each other for visitors, so each looks for strategies to stand out. At 13,600 feet, the nearby Jungfrau sells itself as the “Top of Europe,” site of the continent’s highest-elevation railway station (at 11,300 feet), though nowhere close to its highest peak. The Schilthorn, at just 9,700 feet, proudly embraces its 007 heritage.
The two dozen films in the Bond canon follow a formula: Create a villain bent on world domination. String together a barely plausible plot that features gadgets, fistfights, chase scenes, cool cars, explosions, and attractive young women. Then—spoiler alert—have James Bond improbably save the day. Oh, and set all the action against some of the world’s most beautiful backdrops, including Egyptian pyramids, Caribbean beaches, and Venetian canals.
In 1968, as producers were scouting locations for their sixth Bond film, they came across central Switzerland’s Bernese Oberland region, about 70 miles south of Zurich. In the Ian Fleming novel on which the movie was to be based, the fictional 10,000-foot-high location called Piz Gloria is in eastern Switzerland near the border with Italy. But filmmakers found the peak above Mürren ideal for their purposes, as construction had been underway for five years on a project to build a cable car and mountaintop restaurant. Producers agreed to help with the financing to complete construction in exchange for the right to shoot here.
In the book and film, Piz Gloria masquerades as an allergy-research center. But Bond infiltrates it and discovers that the supposed allergy patients—young women who happen to wear scanty clothes—are actually being hypnotized by Blofeld to spread biological weapons. Bond escapes by skiing down the mountain, then enlists help to attack the building and blow up Blofeld’s lair. A farfetched plot, yes, but one with plenty of entertaining action. The movie version stars George Lazenby as Bond, Telly Savalas of Kojak fame as Blofeld, and Diana Rigg—then known as a star of the British TV show The Avengers and today known to younger audiences as Olenna Tyrell in HBO’s Game of Thrones—as the main Bond girl. In rankings of Bond films, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service usually lands near the top.
In real life, the filming location called Piz Gloria was not destroyed. For decades, it was merely an observation point and restaurant. In 2013, its owners decided it needed more. They added a small museum, known as “Bond World 007,” and have been adding Bond-related features ever since.
Among serious Bond fans, the site “is the Holy Grail of Bond film locations,” says Martijn Mulder, a Dutch journalist who leads occasional Bond tours and coauthored On the Tracks of 007: A Field Guide to the Exotic James Bond Filming Locations Around the World. That’s because filmmakers bankrolled construction of Piz Gloria, which looks just as it did in the late 1960s.
Bond enthusiasts list other prime destinations, too, such as a site near Phuket, Thailand, that has come to be called “James Bond Island” after appearing in 1974’s The Man with the Golden Gun. Last year, Mulder led 40 people on a two-week tour of Japan to visit locations used in 1967’s You Only Live Twice. He was forced to scrap a two-hour hike to a volcano crater that was an earlier Blofeld hideout because the volcano showed signs of erupting. In July, a new Bond museum opened in the Austrian Alps at a spot where scenes from the most recent Bond movie, Spectre, were filmed.
Mulder, 46, says he watched the Bond films repeatedly as a kid. As he grew older, he became curious about how the movies were shot. “Obviously, as a guy, you want to be like James Bond,” he says. “But the older I got, the more interested I got in how these films were made.”
Next year, to mark the 50th anniversary of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, he’s arranging an 11-day tour of filming locations in Portugal and Switzerland, including Piz Gloria. The price: $3,100 (double occupancy, airfare not included).
The first sign that you are near a Bond mecca comes upon boarding the aerial tram up the mountain, as the electric-guitar riff of the James Bond theme music plays on loudspeakers. Upon reaching the summit, you can head upstairs to the restaurant and observation deck or to the museum on the lower level. The July weekday morning I was there, everybody else headed upstairs, leaving my wife and me to explore the museum by ourselves for about 15 minutes—really about all the time we needed.
After walking down a hallway lined with Bond movie posters in different languages, we reached the beginning of the exhibit: a red telephone you pick up to receive instructions from “M,” Bond’s MI6 boss, to locate Blofeld. “He plans to destroy the world. Set off immediately. Find him,” the voice says in a British accent. “Hunt the man down, Bond, quickly. A license to kill is useless unless one can set up the target.”
The museum includes interactive features that simulate flying a helicopter and racing a bobsled. You can graft a photo of your face onto Lazenby’s body as he aims a pistol. There are also plenty of memorabilia, a map of filming sites, and photos and displays of the several months the crew spent on location around Mürren. A walk through the museum finishes with a short film showing action highlights from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. The attention to detail continues in the restrooms, which won—no joke—an International Toilet Tourism Award this year and feature Bond and Bond-girl silhouettes on stall doors and signs encouraging men to “Aim like James.” A recording of Bond in the women’s restroom whispers: “Tonight. My place. Just the two of us.”
The real draw, of course, is to be found upstairs past the restaurant and gift shop, where there’s a stunning 360-degree view of snow-capped mountains. The owners have added Bond accents there, too. In 2015, they introduced the 007 Walk of Fame honoring the movie’s actors and stuntmen, many of whom, including Lazenby, returned for the ceremony. The museum exhibit depicts villagers as happy to return to their lives free of the production’s avalanches, explosions, and gunfire. By most accounts, the filming was a raucous time.
The filming certainly benefited Mürren, which today has a population of under 500 but offers roughly 2,000 hotel beds. “The village profited from people spending vast sums of money keeping the actors happy with alcohol and food and women and the rest of it,” says Alan Ramsay, the Schilthorn’s director of sales.
As Lazenby admitted in the 2017 Hulu documentary Becoming Bond: “There were a lot of women on the film. Thank God for that, because I was there nine months. And you get to know them, like, which one do you fancy first? . . . I’d find somewhere to go every night. I was drinking at least a bottle of vodka a day, smoking as many weeds as I could. I didn’t go to bed until 3 or 4 in the morning every night.”
One of the top-grossing movies of 1969, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is also notable for being Lazenby’s only appearance as Bond. He was an Australian former auto mechanic with no acting experience. Producers cast him in the role for his rugged good looks and self-confidence. Despite the new fame and fortune, he refused an offer for six more Bond films and a $1 million signing bonus in a move sure to go down in the annals of poor career decisions. He has provided a number of explanations, including chafing at the onerous terms of his contract, believing Bond films were becoming anachronisms, and speculating he could make more money elsewhere. Lazenby’s acting career never recovered. His refusal led to the debut of a more durable Bond, Roger Moore, in 1973.
Piz Gloria has endured, too. There’s plenty else to do in the Swiss Alps, of course, like hiking, mountain biking, and skiing. Only the most die-hard Bond fans will design a vacation around a mountaintop restaurant, overlook, and museum tied to a 50-year-old movie. But should you find yourself in Switzerland, and the weather forecast is clear, you might consider spending a couple of hours enjoying the views and whimsical Bond nostalgia.
“The thing is, for the James Bond movies, they always use the top locations, the best hotels, the most beautiful houses,” Mulder explains. “It’s always very high class. When you visit these places, you step into that lifestyle a little bit. It’s the closest you can get, I suppose.”
