Alcázar of Seville

Where it sits. The Alcázar occupies a walled block immediately south-east of Seville Cathedral, entered from the Plaza del Triunfo through the Puerta del León, a deliberately plain brick gateway with a tiled lion set above the arch. Behind it lie roughly seven hectares of courtyards, halls, orchards and pools, wedged between the lanes of the Santa Cruz quarter to the north-east and the Murillo Gardens to the south. It is the oldest royal palace in Europe still in use: the upper apartments, the Cuarto Real Alto, remain the Spanish royal family's Seville residence, which is why parts of the complex close at short notice.

The story behind it. Building began in 913, when Abd al-Rahman III raised a fortress on the ruins of a Roman and Visigothic settlement beside the river. The Almohads rebuilt it in the twelfth century, leaving the Patio del Yeso with its filigree stucco arcade. Ferdinand III took the city in 1248 and his successors kept adding: Alfonso X built a Gothic palace of ribbed vaults over the Almohad courtyard, and Peter I of Castile commissioned the Mudéjar palace that is the building's masterpiece, raised between 1364 and 1366 by craftsmen sent from Granada and Toledo. Its inscriptions praise, in Arabic, both the Nasrid sultan and the Castilian king — a Christian monarch's palace written in the visual language of his Muslim neighbours. The dome of the Hall of Ambassadors, a half-orange of interlaced cedar carpentry, was added in 1427 by Diego Ruiz. From 1503 the Casa de la Contratación administered the Indies fleets from rooms here; Alejo Fernández painted his Virgin of the Navigators, the first European painting to depict the Americas, for its chapel in the 1530s.

What you actually see today. The route runs from the Patio del Yeso and the Gothic halls, hung with eighteenth-century copies of Charles V's Tunis tapestries, into Peter I's palace. There the Patio de las Doncellas has its sunken garden back: excavations in 2002 confirmed the original fourteenth-century layout beneath a Renaissance marble floor, and the pool and orange beds were reinstated. Above the 1360s arcades sits a sixteenth-century upper storey by Luis de Vega. The Patio de las Muñecas, smaller and lit from above, takes its name from tiny faces carved at the base of one arch. Outside, the gardens step down in terraces: the Mercury Pond fed by a Renaissance hydraulic system, the Galería del Grutesco that Vermondo Resta converted from the old Almohad rampart around 1612, the tiled Cenador de Carlos V of 1543, a clipped labyrinth, and beneath the Patio del Crucero the Baños de Doña María de Padilla, a barrel-vaulted rainwater cistern whose still water throws rippling light onto the brick.

On screen. The Alcázar played the Water Gardens of Dorne in the fifth season of Game of Thrones, shot here in October 2014, with a return visit in October 2015 for the sixth. Production used the Mercury Pond terrace, the Grotesque Gallery, the Baths of María de Padilla and the garden walks; visual effects added towers, a coastline and a wider sky, so the screen version reads as a seaside palace rather than an inland courtyard house. The Dornish scenes shot here — Doran Martell in his wheeled chair beside the water, Ellaria Sand's confrontations, Jaime Lannister and Bronn's clumsy attempt to spirit Myrcella away — were later blended with material filmed at the Alcazaba of Almería, so two Andalusian fortresses became a single fictional palace. The parts of the complex that carried the fiction were mostly outdoors:

• the Baños de Doña María de Padilla, whose vaulted cistern became a shaded Dornish bathing hall
• the terrace and steps around the Estanque de Mercurio, used for Doran Martell's audiences
• the Galería del Grutesco, walked as a palace loggia above the Jardín de las Damas
• the clipped garden walks and orange terraces, where the fight between Jaime, Bronn and the Sand Snakes was staged

It was not the building's first role: David Lean filmed here for Lawrence of Arabia in 1962, and in 2005 Ridley Scott used the halls as the court of the King of Jerusalem in Kingdom of Heaven.

Getting there and timing. The Alcázar is a five-minute walk from the cathedral and about fifteen from the Puerta de Jerez tram stop; nothing arrives closer, as the surrounding streets are pedestrianised. Tickets are timed and routinely sell out several days ahead in spring and autumn, and the queue at the Puerta del León moves slowly even with a booking. The first entry slots after opening and the late-afternoon slots in winter give the quietest courtyards; evening guided visits run in summer, when daytime temperatures in the gardens pass forty degrees. Semana Santa and the April fair fill the city entirely. Access is uneven: the ground-floor palaces and most garden paths are level or ramped, but the Baths of María de Padilla, the upper royal apartments and several garden terraces involve steps.