Game of Thrones — Filming Locations & Real Places

Going into Game of Thrones, I mentally braced for "bloody medieval fantasy" and left it at that.

Then Ned Stark got his head cut off in the Season 1 finale, and I realized this show was never going to play nice.

The guy who looked like the hero dying because he refused to compromise his honor — that wasn't just "a character died." It rewrote the rules of the entire show.

The next gut-punch was the Red Wedding in Season 3. Robb Stark, his mother Catelyn, and his wife Talisa all murdered at once, in the middle of a wedding feast. Even on a rewatch, it still takes my breath away.

Then I found out the filming locations weren't CGI at all — they're real places — and suddenly I started seeing the whole show differently.

던루스성(북아일랜드 앤트림) — 강철 군도 파이크성의 실제 촬영지 · Wikimedia Commons

King's Landing is Dubrovnik, Croatia. Minčeta Tower on the city walls is literally the House of the Undying, and the staircase Cersei walked, stripped bare, during her Walk of Shame is the city's real Jesuit Staircase.

Speaking of Cersei — the moment I really reconsidered her was Season 6, when she blows up the entire Sept of Baelor with wildfire. A woman who looked politically cornered turns an entire city block to ash in one move.

Dragonstone is Gaztelugatxe, an island hermitage on Spain's Basque coast — and you apparently have to climb 241 steps just to see that view, which somehow made Daenerys's isolation on that rock hit different.

Honestly, the moment that gave me the most chills was Jon Snow coming back from the dead in Season 6. Betrayed and murdered by his own brothers in the Night's Watch, he opens his eyes again under Melisandre's hands — proof that this show didn't just mean nobody's safe, it meant not even death is necessarily the end.

The landscape beyond the Wall looked like CGI, but it's an actual Icelandic glacier and Þingvellir National Park, where the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates are literally splitting apart. A landscape more fantastical than the fantasy, already sitting there on Earth.

다크 헤지스(북아일랜드 앤트림) — 킹스로드 장면이 촬영된 너도밤나무 가로수길 · Wikimedia Commons

The most argued-over moment heading into the ending was Daenerys. When she burns all of King's Landing to the ground with her dragon after the city had already surrendered, half the audience turned on her instantly. How to read her turn from liberator to conqueror is still the hottest debate among fans.

And it's Jon Snow himself who ends up killing her — which, thinking back on it, still stings.

In the end, the Iron Throne goes to Bran Stark, of all people — and fans still argue endlessly about "why Bran, though."

Braavos's maze-like alleys are a real city too, Girona, Spain — and the cathedral steps aren't a set, they're the literal steps used in the show.

In the end, this series didn't build its world out of CGI — it stitched Westeros together from real corners of the actual world. I haven't set foot in any of these countries yet, but I've started seriously plotting a trip that goes Croatia, then Spain, then Iceland, in order.