Gran Hotel Ciudad de México: The Hotel Under the Glass Ceiling in Two Bond Films

A few steps from the Zócalo, the Gran Hotel Ciudad de México occupies a 1899 department store building whose atrium is crowned by a vast stained-glass ceiling made by the French artist Jacques Grüber in 1908. It's one of the most spectacular interiors in the Americas, and one of the few hotels to appear in two James Bond films, made 26 years apart.

Licence to Kill (1989)

Timothy Dalton's second and final Bond film sends a rogue 007 after drug lord Franz Sanchez, played by Robert Davi, in the fictional Republic of Isthmus, played by Mexico City. The Gran Hotel becomes the Hotel El Presidente, where Bond checks in with Carey Lowell's Pam Bouvier, meets Q, and rides the hotel's gilded open-cage elevator up to their floor.

Spectre (2015)

Spectre opens with one of the most celebrated sequences in the series: a single, apparently unbroken shot following Daniel Craig's Bond through a Day of the Dead parade, into a hotel with Stephanie Sigman's Estrella, up the same ornate elevator Dalton rode 26 years earlier and into Room 327, then out of the window and across the rooftops. The hotel interior is the Gran Hotel; the entrance you see in the parade was filmed on Calle de Tacuba nearby, with the hotel's "CM" logos added to make it match. The parade itself was invented for the film, and Mexico City liked it so much that it now stages one every year. Spectre won the Academy Award for Best Original Song for Sam Smith's "Writing's on the Wall."