Trujillo, Spain

Where it sits. Trujillo stands on a granite outcrop in the plains of eastern Cáceres province, halfway between Madrid and the Portuguese border, with the Sierra de Guadalupe visible to the south-east. The town reads in layers from below: the castle on the summit, a ring of medieval walls and truncated tower-houses beneath it, and then the Renaissance and baroque palaces sliding down to the great sloping Plaza Mayor, which is one of the finest public spaces in Spain. Around it the dehesa runs flat to the horizon, grazed by the sheep whose milk makes the region's cheese and by the fighting bulls of the Extremaduran estates.

The story behind it. The hill was fortified under Muslim rule in the ninth and tenth centuries, and the castle preserves that origin in its horseshoe-arched gate and its two great rock-cut cisterns, with a later Christian shrine, the Virgen de la Victoria, set into the gate tower. Castile took the town definitively in 1232. Trujillo's second life came three centuries later, when its poor hidalgos went to the Americas and a few of them came back extraordinarily rich. Francisco Pizarro, the conqueror of the Inca empire, was born here around 1478; so were Francisco de Orellana, who followed the Amazon to the Atlantic, and a long list of lesser conquistadores. Their families rebuilt the town in stone: the Palacio de la Conquista on the Plaza Mayor was raised for Hernando Pizarro and his niece and wife Francisca Pizarro Yupanqui, daughter of Francisco Pizarro and an Inca princess, and their busts still look out from the corner balcony beneath a carved coat of arms.

What you actually see today. The Plaza Mayor slopes and turns, ringed by arcades and stairways, with Charles Cary Rumsey's bronze equestrian Pizarro planted in the middle since 1927 — a work first cast in the United States and given to the town by the sculptor's widow. From there the streets climb through the walled upper town past the Palacio de los Marqueses de Piedras Albas, the Palacio de Orellana-Pizarro with its Renaissance patio, and the Casa-Museo Pizarro, to the church of Santa María la Mayor, whose Romanesque tower can be climbed for the best view of the roofscape and whose retable holds panels by Fernando Gallego. Higher still, the castle's walls can be walked completely, and storks nest on almost every tower and belfry in the town. Trujillo is also a serious food destination: the national cheese fair each May turns the Plaza Mayor into a market of Torta del Casar, Ibores and sheep's-milk cheeses from across Spain, and the restaurants around the arcades run on Iberian pork, migas and lamb from the surrounding pastures. Look for the tower-houses that were cut down to size — several of the medieval towers, including the Torre del Alfiler with its stork nests, were shortened on royal orders in the fifteenth century to break the power of the local nobility, and the flat, truncated tops are still visible against the sky.

On screen. Trujillo Castle became Casterly Rock, the Lannister seat, for the seventh season of Game of Thrones, filmed in November 2016 with Lannister banners hung from the battlements. The material appears in The Queen's Justice, the third episode, in the sequence where Grey Worm and the Unsullied storm the fortress — the castle's real walls and gate supply the exterior, with the cliffs, harbour and vast interior added digitally, since the fictional Casterly Rock is carved into a mountain above the sea. The town's stonework proved useful enough that the prequel series House of the Dragon returned to Trujillo, using the castle and the streets below it for King's Landing and Westerlands backgrounds, and pairing them with the walled old town of Cáceres forty-five kilometres west. Filming brought several days of closures and a large local crew, and the castle now runs themed tours built around the connection.

Getting there and timing. Trujillo has no railway station; the A-5 motorway from Madrid takes about two and a half hours, Cáceres is forty minutes west, and intercity buses stop below the old town. Parking is easiest on the ring road, since the upper streets are steep, cobbled and often barely wide enough for a car. The castle and the churches charge small separate admissions or a combined ticket, and most close for a long midday break. Spring and early autumn are the seasons to aim for: the dehesa is green, evenings on the Plaza Mayor are long, and the granite is not radiating the heat it stores through an Extremaduran July.