Los Barruecos

Where it sits. Los Barruecos lies just south of Malpartida de Cáceres, fourteen kilometres west of the city of Cáceres, on a plateau of dehesa — the Extremaduran landscape of open holm-oak pasture grazed by cattle and black Iberian pigs. The protected area is small enough to cross on foot in an afternoon and strange enough to feel like another country: hundreds of granite boulders, some the size of houses, balanced and stacked across bare rock slabs, with four still ponds reflecting them. The Junta de Extremadura declared it a natural monument in 1996.

The story behind it. The boulders are a batholith of granite that cooled deep underground and was slowly exhumed as the softer rock above it eroded away. Weathering along the joint planes rounded the blocks into the bolos you see now, leaving perched stones balanced on contact points a few centimetres wide. People have used the site for as long as there have been people here: there are schematic rock paintings in shelters among the boulders, and graves cut directly into flat granite, their human outlines still sharp. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the ponds were dammed and enlarged to serve the wool-washing industry, when the transhumant merino flocks of Extremadura were driven here and their fleeces scoured in the water before being shipped north — the long low buildings by the largest pond are the surviving lavadero. That industrial ruin is now the Museo Vostell Malpartida, an eccentric and internationally respected collection of Fluxus and contemporary art that occupies the old washing sheds.

What you actually see today. A signposted circuit of around four kilometres loops from the visitor area past the Charca del Barrueco de Abajo and up among the granite. The wildlife is the surprise. Los Barruecos holds one of the densest colonies of white storks in Europe that nests directly on rock rather than on buildings or trees, with big untidy nests balanced on the tops of boulders from January onward; cormorants roost on the same stones in winter, and great crested grebes, black-winged stilts and herons work the shallows. Sunset is the hour photographers come for, when the granite goes orange and the water flattens. Bring boots — the paths cross bare rock and cattle pasture — and expect gates, since the surrounding dehesa is grazed. Art turns up in unlikely places along the route: Wolf Vostell's VOAEX, a black 1970 Opel Admiral embedded in a slab of concrete, sits outdoors among the boulders where he inaugurated it in 1976, and other large works stand between the ponds and the museum buildings. The prehistoric material is less obvious and worth asking about at the interpretation centre, since the rock shelters and the granite-cut graves are easy to walk past without noticing them.

On screen. In the spring of 2017 the production of Game of Thrones turned the open ground beside the boulders into the Reach, the setting of the Loot Train Attack in The Spoils of War, the fourth episode of the seventh season. It is the sequence in which Daenerys Targaryen rides Drogon down onto a Lannister supply column returning from Highgarden, with Jaime Lannister and Bronn scrambling for the scorpion crossbow — the first time the series set a dragon against a Westerosi army in daylight. The shoot was enormous by the standards of a location that ordinarily sees only walkers and storks: the director Matt Shakman's team spent roughly eighteen main-unit days here, with additional second-unit and effects photography, and the sequence included a single shot in which twenty stunt performers were set alight, which the production's stunt coordinator described as a record for the most people burning in one take. Horses, wagons, a full mounted Dothraki charge and a controlled-burn plain were all staged within metres of the natural monument, and the location team's work on that season won a Location Managers Guild award.

Getting there and timing. From Cáceres it is a twenty-minute drive on the N-521 to Malpartida and then a signposted couple of kilometres south; buses reach Malpartida village, from which it is a walk of about two kilometres. Entry to the natural monument is free and the tracks are open in daylight; the museum charges a small admission and closes on Mondays. Late winter and spring are the best combination — full ponds, nesting storks, green pasture and workable temperatures — while by midsummer the granite becomes an oven and the ponds shrink. There is little shade anywhere on the circuit, so early morning or the last two hours of light are the sensible slots, and they happen to be when the rock looks best.