Set architecture: the real castles behind ‘House of the Dragon’

The village itself predates its castle by some margin, with archaeological evidence of Roman, Visigothic and Moorish occupation on the hill before the Knights Templar fortified it in the twelfth century under Gualdim Pais. Its more distinctive architectural feature is not the castle but the way its houses were built directly around the boulders rather than clearing them, wedging roofs, walls and even doorways into the rock itself. Ryan Condal has said the production knew immediately, on seeing Monsanto from the road, that they had found the location.

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La Calahorra stands in for Pentos, one of the Free Cities across the Narrow Sea, and its inner courtyard hosted a dinner scene between Daemon Targaryen, Laena Velaryon and their daughters in season one. The castle was built between 1509 and 1512 for Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar y Mendoza, first Marquis of Zenete, and is considered one of the earliest examples of Italian Renaissance architecture built outside Italy. The commission had two architects: the Castilian Lorenzo Vázquez began the project before the Marquis, dissatisfied, brought in the Genoese Michele Carlone to finish it. 

From the outside, La Calahorra reads as pure Castilian military architecture: a fortress at 1,250 metres built from stone salvaged from an earlier Moorish structure on the same site. Inside, it opens into a Renaissance palace across two storeys, with a central courtyard, four corner towers, and staircases and door surrounds carved by Genoese workshops from imported Carrara marble. The crew filmed the courtyard scenes without significantly altering it, reportedly leaving the heraldic carvings on its columns uncovered throughout the shoot.

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The seat of House Velaryon is a genuine tidal island, cut off from the Cornish mainland at high water and reachable on foot only when a stone causeway emerges at low tide. Its earliest religious use dates to the eleventh century, when Edward the Confessor is thought to have granted the site to the Benedictine order of Mont-Saint-Michel in Normandy, whose own tidal island, the Mount, the Isle of Skelligs was modelled after. A priory church was built between 1135 and 1144 under Abbot Bernard, forming the core of the structure that survives today.

The site was fortified in 1193, when Henry de la Pomeray seized it by disguising his men as pilgrims, and the castle grew outward from the monastery over the centuries, layering Gothic, Tudor, and later Victorian additions onto the medieval core. The St Aubyn family has held the Mount since around 1650, and still occupies part of it today alongside the National Trust. For filming, the production added a CGI Gothic tower digitally borrowed from Butrón Castle in the Basque Country, though the temple seen at Laena’s funeral in episode seven was a physical set built on the Mount itself rather than a digital addition; the tidal causeway and working monastic core beneath it are unaltered.

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The gardens used for King’s Landing’s royal grounds in season one are a real clifftop landscape, designed in 1919 by the Catalan architect Nicolau Rubió i Tudurí for the Marquis of Roviralta. Rubió i Tudurí trained under the French landscape architect Jean-Claude Nicolas Forestier, with whom he had worked on Barcelona’s Montjuïc gardens, and Santa Clotilde is considered one of the finest surviving examples of the noucentista garden, a Catalan movement that sought order and proportion against the excesses of the preceding style, drawing on the terraced logic of Italian Renaissance gardens rather than romantic naturalism. 

Faced with a steep clifftop site, Rubió i Tudurí turned the gradient into the garden’s organising feature, laying out cascading terraces linked by stairways and ramps around a central staircase known as the Escala de les Sirenes, the Stairway of the Mermaids. He planted ivy along the risers of its steps so that, viewed from below, the staircase reads as a waterfall of foliage rather than stone. The planting throughout is deliberately restrained: cypress, pine, myrtle and agapanthus rather than flowerbeds, kept spare so the eye is drawn past the garden to the sea beyond it. The production made minimal changes to the site for filming.

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