Chances are you haven't heard of Arrábida Natural Park – but you may have seen it on screen. It was to this coastal park in Portugal that George Lazenby's James Bond travels after his wedding in the 1969 film "On Her Majesty's Secret Service". Celebrity endorsements don't get much more glamorous than that, says Richard Mellor in The Times – and nor are they always so well deserved.
The park's forested hills are as verdant and its seas as sparkling today as in the movie, and though Bond's trip there turns sour when his new bride – Diana Rigg's Tracy – is shot dead by Blofeld's henchwoman on a coast road, such mishaps are rare. It's peculiar, then, that Arrábida and its beautiful beaches receive relatively few foreign visitors.
The park stretches along the south coast of the Setúbal Peninsula, where the vast Sado Estuary meets the ocean, roughly 45 minutes' drive south of central Lisbon. It encompasses nearly 70 square miles of land and sea, but there are very few hotels within its bounds.
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And there are plenty of cultural attractions nearby, including medieval castles and the city of Setúbal, which has a lively covered market and an exquisite chapel in the Manueline (late gothic) style.
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