Old Town of Cáceres

Where it sits. The walled old town of Cáceres, known locally as the Ciudad Monumental, occupies a low hill immediately east of the modern Plaza Mayor, in the middle of Extremadura roughly halfway between Salamanca and Seville. It is small — you can walk its length in ten minutes — and almost hermetically preserved: within the circuit of walls there are no shopfronts, no advertising and virtually no cars, and the skyline is a thicket of square granite towers with stork nests on top. UNESCO inscribed it as a World Heritage Site in 1986, citing the unusual survival of a complete medieval and Renaissance urban fabric.

The story behind it. Roman Norba Caesarina stood here, but the town that survives is Almohad and Christian. The walls, with their rectangular towers of rammed earth and stone, are largely twelfth-century Almohad work, and one of them, the Torre del Bujaco, still dominates the Plaza Mayor. Castile took the town for good in 1229 under Alfonso IX of León, and the noble families who profited from the frontier — and later from the Americas — built the tower-houses that give the place its character. Those towers were a problem: in 1477 Isabella I ordered them cut down to curb private warfare between the Golfines, Ovando, Ulloa and Carvajal clans, which is why so many are flat-topped today. The Arco de la Estrella, the great ceremonial gateway into the enclosure, is much later, remodelled by Manuel de Larra Churriguera in the 1720s with a deep, curving passage designed so that carriages could turn into the narrow streets.

What you actually see today. Through the Arco de la Estrella you climb to the Plaza de Santa María, a small triangular square hemmed in by the concatedral of Santa María, the Palacio de Mayoralgo, the Palacio Episcopal and the Palacio de Carvajal, whose round Almohad tower and courtyard fig tree are open to visitors free of charge. Beyond lie the Casa de los Golfines de Abajo, the Casa del Sol with its enormous carved arms, and the Plaza de San Jorge with the white twin-towered church of San Francisco Javier, whose towers can be climbed for the view across the roofs. The Museo de Cáceres in the Casa de las Veletas is the essential interior: beneath it survives an Almohad aljibe, a twelfth-century cistern of horseshoe arches on stone columns standing in still water, one of the best preserved in the Islamic west. Granite, whitewash and heavy shadow set the tone throughout, and after dark the lighting turns the streets theatrical. On the southern edge, below the Casa de las Veletas, the small quarter of San Antonio preserves the layout of the medieval Jewish district, its lanes narrower and its houses lower than anything in the noble core, ending at a whitewashed hermitage that was once a synagogue.

On screen. The absence of anything modern inside the walls has made Cáceres one of Europe's busiest historical film sets. For the seventh season of Game of Thrones, shot in the autumn of 2016, the enclosure became King's Landing: the sequence in The Queen's Justice in which Euron Greyjoy parades his captives Yara Greyjoy and Ellaria Sand through jeering crowds was filmed around the Plaza de Santa María, the Cuesta de la Compañía and the Arco de la Estrella, with the Plaza de las Veletas also used. Five years later HBO returned for House of the Dragon, filming in October 2021 and after: the Plaza de Santa María and the surrounding lanes appear as the streets of King's Landing during Daemon and Rhaenyra's night excursion in the fourth episode of the first season, and again during the search for Aegon Targaryen in the ninth. The city has since built a signposted route linking the filming spots, and local guides run tours that pair the fiction with the actual history of the buildings.

Getting there and timing. Trains from Madrid take around four hours and buses about four and a half; the station sits a couple of kilometres from the old town. Cars must be left outside the walls, and the streets inside are cobbled, steep in places and hard going for wheelchairs and pushchairs, though the Plaza de Santa María and the main axis are reachable without steps from the Arco de la Estrella. Museums close on Mondays and most take a long midday break. Spring and autumn are the comfortable seasons — Extremadura in July regularly exceeds forty degrees — and the WOMAD world music festival in May fills the squares with stages and crowds. Late evening, when the day visitors have gone and the granite is lit from below, is the hour the walled town is at its most extraordinary.