Call of Girona

Where it sits. Girona stands about 100 kilometres northeast of Barcelona and 40 inland from the Costa Brava, at the confluence of four rivers — the Ter, the Onyar, the Guell and the Galligants. Roughly 103,000 people live there. The modern city spreads west of the Onyar; everything a visitor comes for lies on the eastern bank, packed onto a hillside inside the Forca Vella, the walled enclosure the Romans laid out and every subsequent occupier reused. The two halves are stitched together by a row of footbridges, one of them a red iron span built in 1877 by the workshop of Gustave Eiffel, and by the painted riverfront houses whose ochre, rust and mustard facades hang directly over the water and supply the city's most reproduced image.

Layers, in order. The Romans founded Gerunda around 79 BC as a fortified staging post on the Via Augusta, and the polygonal base courses of the old wall are still visible on the eastern side. Charlemagne's Franks took the town in 785, which is why the medieval walls are described locally as Carolingian; the Passeig de la Muralla now runs along the top of them for well over a kilometre, climbing through the gardens and towers above the cathedral with the Pyrenees visible north on clear days. Girona was besieged repeatedly — seven times in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and most famously for seven months in 1809 under Mariano Alvarez de Castro, who held it against the French until starvation and typhus ended the defence.

The Call. Girona held one of the most significant Jewish communities in medieval Catalonia, home in the thirteenth century to the scholar Nahmanides and to an important school of kabbalistic thought. Its quarter, the Call, survives as a dense, stepped maze off Carrer de la Forca — narrow lanes, blind arches, courtyards reached through tunnels — and is among the best-preserved Jewish quarters anywhere in Europe, though what survives is the street plan rather than the buildings' original use. The community was expelled in 1492. The Museum of Jewish History on Carrer de la Forca does the difficult work of explaining both the intellectual achievement and the pogroms that preceded the expulsion, using tombstones recovered from the hillside cemetery on Montjuic.

On screen. In the late summer of 2015 the HBO production of Game of Thrones spent roughly two weeks filming across the old town for its sixth season, which is why Girona now carries three separate Westerosi identities. The cathedral steps became the Great Sept of Baelor in King's Landing; the Call and the lanes around Sant Pere de Galligants became Braavos; and the monastery precinct stood in for Oldtown. The specific locations are all walkable in an hour:

• The cathedral staircase, where Jaime Lannister rides up on horseback to confront the Faith Militant in Blood of My Blood.
• Pujada de Sant Domenec and Carrer del Bisbe Josep Cartana, the stepped lanes down which Arya Stark is chased by the Waif in No One.
• The twelfth-century Arab Baths, dressed as a Braavosi interior.
• Placa dels Jurats, which held the Braavosi theatre stage where Arya watches a troupe perform.

Girona had earlier stood in for eighteenth-century France in Tom Tykwer's Perfume in 2006, using the same shadowed lanes for entirely different reasons.

What to eat. The city punches far above its size. El Celler de Can Roca, run by the three Roca brothers on the northern edge of town, has held three Michelin stars since 2009 and has twice been ranked the best restaurant in the world; reservations open eleven months ahead and vanish the same day. Below that stratum the city is genuinely strong on Empordan cooking — rice dishes, escalivada, salt cod, mar i muntanya combinations of prawn and chicken — and the covered Mercat del Lleo supplies most of it. Rocambolesc, the Roca family ice cream shop, is the accessible end of the same operation.

Getting there and timing. High-speed trains from Barcelona Sants reach Girona in 38 minutes and Paris in under six hours; the airport 13 kilometres south is a low-cost hub with buses into the centre. Everything worth seeing is on foot, but the old town is built on a hill and paved in polished stone, so the gradients and the steps are the limiting factor for anyone with mobility difficulties. Spring and autumn are the sensible seasons: July and August are hot, humid and full of coach parties routed inland from the coast, while the Temps de Flors festival in May floods the courtyards, staircases and the cathedral steps with flower installations and doubles the visitor count for a week.