Game of Thrones Tour Dubrovnik: Walk King's Landing

The moment you step through Pile Gate into Dubrovnik’s Old Town, something happens that no television screen prepares you for. The limestone is the right colour. The walls are that height. The sea below Fort Lovrijenac really does glitter in the way it does in the show — because it is the same sea, photographed from almost the same angle, without alteration. HBO didn’t dress this city up as King’s Landing. They found a place that already looked like a medieval capital at the height of its power, and they filmed it.

Dubrovnik served as the primary exterior location for King’s Landing from Season 2 (2012) through to the final shots of Season 8 (2019). What drew the production here after a single season in Malta was simple: Ragusa, as the city was known for five centuries as an independent republic, had preserved its architecture with an almost obsessive completeness. The walls had never been breached. The streets had not been widened for cars. The stone had weathered to exactly the right shade of pale gold. For six seasons, roughly one thousand visitors per day in high season make the same choice the HBO location scouts did — they come to walk through the city as the show.

Fort Lovrijenac: The Red Keep Above the Sea

Fort Lovrijenac stands on a 37-metre limestone promontory five minutes west of Pile Gate, connected to the mainland by a bridge and surrounded on three sides by open sea. It is the building that appears most consistently as the Red Keep’s exterior across the entire run of the series. The courtyard hosted Joffrey’s name day tournament in Season 2, Episode 1. The upper terrace — the one with the sweeping view towards Blackwater Bay — was where Cersei delivered the line “Power is power” to Littlefinger. The internal staircases featured in multiple conversations between Tyrion, Varys, and Bronn across Seasons 2 and 3.

What visitors notice first in the courtyard is how small it is. HBO used steadicam work and temporary set extensions to make it read larger on screen. The arena where Joffrey’s jousting and sword fights played out is, in person, the size of a medium car park. The production also relied on the fort’s geography — the angles that emphasise the cliff drop, the sea-level approach from the water — rather than any extensive dressing.

The inscription carved above the entrance gate has become a favourite detail for GoT fans: Non bene pro toto libertas venditur auro — “Freedom is not well sold for all the gold in the world.” This was the maxim of the Ragusan republic, engraved when the fort was built around 1018 to prevent Venetian occupation of the site. The city’s founders built the walls facing inland deliberately thin — 60 centimetres — so that Ragusa could destroy its own fort from the ramparts if it fell into enemy hands. The irony of that motto presiding over a building used to represent the seat of tyranny in Westeros has not been lost on the show’s more attentive viewers.

The City Walls: Walking Blackwater Bay

The Walls of Dubrovnik run for 1,940 metres around the Old Town, reaching 25 metres at their highest point and between 4 and 6 metres thick on the landward side. They are considered the best-preserved medieval city walls in Europe, and they have earned their UNESCO protection. They are also the location where Tyrion, Podrick, and Bronn walked during the post-battle repairs in Season 3, where the Mountain killed prisoners in Season 4, and where Loras Tyrell was arrested in Season 5.

The more significant function of the walls in the series, however, is geographical. Every establishing shot that shows King’s Landing from above or at a distance — the wide angles that place the Red Keep in context, that show the city at its full medieval scale — was shot either from the walls or by cameras positioned to use them as foreground. The battlements defined the visual silhouette of King’s Landing for eight seasons.

The walk itself takes between 90 minutes and 2.5 hours depending on your pace and how many photographs you take. The north-facing stretch gives the clearest view down into the Old Town’s orange rooftops — the shot that most Game of Thrones fans recognise as the essential aerial of King’s Landing. Minčeta Tower, the round defensive tower at the walls’ highest point, doubles as the exterior of the House of the Undying in Season 2, Episode 10, where Daenerys circles the building searching for an entrance to recover her dragons. The famous “Where are my dragons?” sequence was filmed here; the hallucinatory interior is entirely CGI.

The bay to the west of the city — Pile Bay, visible from the ramparts near Fort Bokar — represents Blackwater Bay. Looking at it in person, the correspondence is exact. The production needed no adjustment: the bay is enclosed by the right headlands, at the right scale, with Fort Lovrijenac at the position the Red Keep would occupy in the fictional geography.

The Jesuit Staircase: The Walk of Shame

The Jesuit Staircase, built in 1738 to a design by Roman architect Pietro Passalacqua and inspired by the Spanish Steps in Rome, connects Gundulic Square to the Church of Saint Ignatius above. It comprises roughly 100 steps of pale limestone, wide enough to serve as an outdoor amphitheatre for performances. In the context of Game of Thrones Season 5, Episode 10, these steps are the starting point of Cersei Lannister’s Walk of Shame — the scene in which she is stripped of her clothing, has her hair shorn, and walks from the Great Sept of Baelor through the streets of King’s Landing to the Red Keep while the crowd shouts “Shame.”

The production filmed the sequence across three days in October 2014, beginning each day at 5 or 6 in the morning to work with the raking light of dawn. The limestone was deliberately wet down before each take — HBO wanted the grey, glistening texture visible on screen, not the warm golden tone the stone takes in afternoon sun. The surrounding merchants and restaurant owners were paid to close for the duration; residents of the nearby buildings were recruited as background crowd for EUR 50–80 per day.

Lena Headey was present for the close-up facial work throughout. The full-body nude walking sequence was performed by Rebecca Van Cleave, a British actress who served as body double because Headey was pregnant during filming. Headey’s face was composited onto the footage in post-production — a detail that went unacknowledged in the show’s credits until fan investigation uncovered it, and which was eventually confirmed in interviews.

The staircase itself connects to the route of the walk through the Old Town: down St. Dominika Street and through to Ploče Gate, where Cersei reaches Qyburn and the newly reanimated Mountain at the scene’s end. You can walk the entire route in about 15 minutes.

Lokrum Island: The Iron Throne and Qarth’s Gardens

Six hundred metres from the Old Town’s harbour, Lokrum sits low in the Adriatic — a nature reserve with no permanent residents, a 15th-century Benedictine monastery, botanical gardens, a saltwater lake, and a population of peacocks that roam freely throughout. The island’s first documented mention dates to 1023. Richard I of England is said to have stopped here in 1192 after a shipwreck. A local legend holds that anyone who takes ownership of Lokrum is cursed.

The production used Lokrum’s monastery and botanical gardens as Qarth in Season 2. The garden party scene in Episode 5 was filmed in the Maximilian gardens beside the monastery cloister. The cloister itself appeared in several interior Qarth sequences. The Island’s combination of Mediterranean garden architecture and the atmosphere of an enclosed, self-contained world suited Qarth’s aesthetic — a city of wealth and strangeness at the edge of the known world.

The current attraction for Game of Thrones visitors is a full-scale Iron Throne replica installed in the monastery’s visitor centre. Photographs are included in the ferry ticket price. It is, by some margin, the most photographed object on the island.

The ferry runs from Dubrovnik’s Old Port every 30 to 60 minutes throughout the operating season (April through late October). The crossing takes 10 to 15 minutes. The island is accessible only by this ferry — there is no private boat mooring — which keeps visitor numbers manageable compared to the Old Town. A 20% discount applies to ferry tickets if you hold a Dubrovnik Pass 3-day.

Hidden Old Town Locations: Rector’s Palace, Gradac Park, the West Pier

Dubrovnik’s filming geography extends well beyond the obvious landmarks. Three locations in particular reward visitors who move beyond the standard tour route.

Rector’s Palace, the Gothic-Renaissance seat of Ragusa’s elected governor, was used as the exterior and courtyard of the Spice King’s residence in Qarth (Season 2, Episode 6). Daenerys’s repeated attempts to secure ships for the crossing to Westeros played out here — the production spent weeks filming for what totals less than three minutes of screen time. The palace is now a cultural museum (EUR 15 adults, free with the Dubrovnik Pass). The courtyard’s architecture reads very differently in person from its Qarth presentation on screen.

Gradac Park, a public garden west of Fort Lovrijenac, was used for the Purple Wedding reception in Season 4, Episodes 2 and 3 — the ceremony where Joffrey is poisoned by Olenna Tyrell. The area around the park’s central fountain was dressed as the wedding banquet space. The park is free to enter and open daily.

West Pier (the western jetty near Pile Harbour) appeared in Season 8, Episode 6 as the location where Jon Snow says his final goodbye before travelling north. The small stone doorways along the pier wall also appeared in Season 2, Episode 1, where the Gold Cloaks pursued and killed Robert’s bastard children. These details are easy to overlook without a guide — the pier functions as an ordinary harbour approach for local boat traffic, with nothing to signal its screen history.

Trsteno Arboretum: The Red Keep’s Gardens

Twenty-two kilometres north-west of Dubrovnik, reached by local bus or taxi, Trsteno Arboretum is Croatia’s oldest botanical garden — founded in the late 15th century by Ivan Gučetić-Gozze, a wealthy Ragusan shipowner who planted 70 acres of gardens above the Adriatic coast. The property passed through several hands before coming under the Croatian Academy of Sciences, and has been a protected natural monument since 1964.

For Game of Thrones viewers, Trsteno is the Red Keep’s gardens as they appear throughout Seasons 3 and 4. The pergola with its distinctive arched stone columns is the most recognisable element: it appears in the Season 3 scene where Sansa meets Lady Olenna Tyrell for the first time, in Season 4 when Olenna reveals to Margaery that she poisoned Joffrey, and in Season 4 when Oberyn Martell promises Cersei he will carry a message to Myrcella in Dorne. The garden’s combination of old-growth trees, Renaissance water features, and structured planting made it visually consistent enough to serve as a recurring interior throughout both seasons.

Admission is EUR 10 for adults and EUR 7 for children. Opening hours from May to October are 7:00 to 19:00. The most direct public transport option is the local bus (lines 12, 15, or 35) from the main bus station; a return journey by taxi costs approximately EUR 50. The arboretum is half a day well spent if you have extra time — and it makes most sense to combine it with the private driving tour option below, which covers both Old Town filming locations and the arboretum in a single day.

• Book city walls tickets online well in advance — mandatory from 2026, no walk-up sales
• Arrive at the walls at 8:00 opening — cruise ship groups flood in from 10:30
• Buy the Dubrovnik Pass 1-day (EUR 45) if you're visiting walls + Rector's Palace + Fort Lovrijenac
• Photograph the Jesuit Staircase before 8 am or after 6 pm for crowd-free shots
• Take the 10-15 minute ferry from Old Port to Lokrum Island — Iron Throne replica is free with ticket
• Walk the full Walk of Shame route: Jesuit Staircase → St. Dominika Street → Ploče Gate
• Find the Latin inscription above Fort Lovrijenac's gate: Non bene pro toto libertas venditur auro
• Check cruise ship arrivals at Dubrovnik Port to plan your timing (especially July–August)
• Bring a reusable water bottle — free drinking fountains throughout the Old Town
• Allow a full day: GoT tour (2h) + walls (2h) + Lokrum Island (2–3h) fills a day comfortably

Plan your trip with Pixidia

Pixidia learns how you travel and helps you build a trip that truly fits you and everyone coming along.

Open the planner