Wilmington, with a population of 69,000, is the largest city on the Atlantic Coast in North Carolina. It has lovely old houses, film studios and fine sandy beaches. At the heart of the old town there are still many well-preserved buildings from the 18th and 19th centuries. An architectural masterpiece in the city centre is the Bellamy Mansion Museum of History & Design Arts surrounded by 14 white Corinthian pillars. The most important attraction in the region is the battleship the USS North Carolina, which survived the Second World War unscathed. But Wilmington surprisingly became famous for a very different reason at the end of the 20th century: in 1983/84 film crews came to the city to film for the first time. Today, after Los Angeles and New York, Wilmington is the largest film city in the USA and films, TV series and music videos are shot here.
