Sant Pere de Galligants

Where it sits. Sant Pere de Galligants stands just outside the Roman wall of Girona, at the foot of the hill on which the cathedral sits, beside the Galligants stream that gives it its name and that still runs in a stone channel past the apse. The approach from the old town is down the Pujada de Sant Feliu and across the Pont de Sant Pere, and the monastery announces itself with an octagonal Lombard bell tower rising over low roofs. Because it lay beyond the defences, the community built its own small enclosure, and the church, the cloister and the adjoining chapel of Sant Nicolau form a compact Romanesque group unusually undisturbed by later rebuilding.

A Benedictine house outside the walls. A monastery is documented on the site from 992, though the community is probably older. The present church was consecrated in 1131 and is a textbook of mature Catalan Romanesque: a barrel-vaulted nave of three bays, two aisles, three apses, and a west front with a recessed portal of four archivolts under a rose window whose tracery is thought to be a fourteenth-century insertion. The bell tower, octagonal above a square base and articulated with Lombard bands and paired openings, is the most distinctive silhouette in this quarter of the city. The chapel of Sant Nicolau alongside, of the same period, has a rare trefoil east end — three apses radiating from a square crossing — and was probably a funerary chapel.

The cloister. The twelfth-century cloister is the reason art historians come. Its capitals carry a dense narrative programme: the infancy of Christ, the Passion, Daniel among the lions, plus the full Romanesque bestiary of harpies, sirens, entwined serpents and men wrestling lions. Several are signed by workshops also active at Sant Cugat and Girona Cathedral, which lets scholars trace the movement of masons across Catalonia in the decades either side of 1150. The galleries are low, the light is oblique, and the carving repays a slow circuit with a torch or a phone light on the darker north walk.

A museum since 1857. The monastery was suppressed in the nineteenth-century desamortizacion, and rather than fall into ruin it was handed over for archaeological storage — one of the earliest such conversions in Spain. It has held collections continuously since 1857 and today houses the Girona branch of the Museu d'Arqueologia de Catalunya. The permanent display runs from Palaeolithic material through the Iberian settlements of the Emporda to a strong Roman section drawn from Empuries and the Via Augusta, with a room of medieval Jewish tombstones recovered from the Montjuic cemetery above the city. The exhibits sit inside the Romanesque fabric rather than in purpose-built galleries, which is both the charm and the limitation of the place.

On screen. The monastery and the ground immediately around it were among the Girona locations used by the HBO production of Game of Thrones during its two-week shoot in the city in the late summer of 2015, for the sixth season. The precinct and the adjoining bridge and streets were dressed as Braavos, supplying the market stalls and canal-side alleys through which Arya Stark moves; the same complex was then used for Oldtown, standing in for the approach to the Citadel where Samwell Tarly and Gilly arrive at the close of the season. Almost nothing was physically altered — the production worked with set dressing, extras and digital extension rather than construction, which is why the location is instantly recognisable and equally instantly ordinary once the stalls are gone.

The quarter around it. The lanes below the monastery form one of the quietest corners of the old town. The Banys Arabs, a bath house of 1194 built to an Islamic plan by Christian masons and restored after the sack of 1285, stand two minutes away and are among the best-preserved buildings of their type in western Europe; their skylit central chamber, ringed by slender columns under an octagonal lantern, was one of the interiors the Game of Thrones production dressed as Braavos. The Galligants footbridge and the climb back to the Portal de Sant Pere close a coherent twenty-minute circuit.

Visiting and timing. Entry is by museum ticket, which covers the church, the cloister and the archaeological collection; it is inexpensive, and combined tickets with other Girona monuments exist. The museum closes on Mondays and keeps shorter hours from November to March. Allow an hour, more if the capitals hold the attention. The ground floor is broadly level but the site has thresholds, worn flagstones and a stepped approach from the old town, so access is workable rather than easy. Sant Pere sits at the northern end of the standard walking circuit through the Barri Vell, five minutes below the cathedral and directly beneath the northern stretch of the Passeig de la Muralla, which makes it the natural point at which to descend from the walls and finish a morning in the old town.