Castle of Santa Florentina

Where it sits. The Castle of Santa Florentina stands roughly a kilometre and a half inland from Canet de Mar, in the Maresme district of Catalonia, about 45 kilometres northeast of Barcelona. It occupies a shallow valley of plane trees and market gardens behind the coastal ridge, close enough to the sea for the light to have the Mediterranean flatness but far enough back to be invisible from the shore road. The approach is along a lane between fields, and the building appears without warning: a mass of crenellated towers, arcades and battlements that looks convincingly medieval from a distance and turns out, on closer inspection, to be a fabrication of great skill and comparatively recent date.

What is actually old. At the core is a genuine eleventh-century fortified farmhouse, one of the masies fortificades built across the Maresme when Muslim raiding from the sea was a standing risk. Documents place a defensive structure here from around 1017. It passed through the Bell-lloc and Montaner families and remained a working agricultural property for eight centuries, gaining a chapel, a tower and successive extensions without ever becoming a castle in the military sense. The medieval walls survive inside the later shell, and the guided tour makes a point of showing where the eleventh-century masonry ends and the nineteenth-century work begins.

Domenech i Montaner's rebuilding. Between roughly 1900 and 1908 the architect Lluis Domenech i Montaner — the designer of the Palau de la Musica Catalana and the Hospital de Sant Pau in Barcelona, both now UNESCO World Heritage sites — remodelled the property for his cousin Ramon de Montaner, the publisher who part-owned the Montaner i Simon house. Domenech treated the commission as an exercise in national romanticism: he wrapped the old farmhouse in neo-Gothic and neo-Romanesque wings, raised towers, added the great hall with its exposed timber and brick vaulting, and inserted genuine Romanesque and Gothic capitals, doorways and windows salvaged from demolished buildings elsewhere in Catalonia. The result is neither a restoration nor a folly but a deliberate reconstruction of an imagined Catalan past, and it is one of the largest private projects of the Catalan Modernisme movement.

On screen. In 2015 the HBO production of Game of Thrones filmed here for the sixth season, using the castle as Horn Hill, the ancestral seat of House Tarly. The sequence appears in the sixth episode, Blood of My Blood: Samwell Tarly brings Gilly and her infant son home to face his father Randyll, and the encounter plays out across the arrival at the gate, the courtyard, and the tense dinner in the hall. The choice was shrewd, because Domenech's invented medievalism gives exactly the read a production designer wants — a great house that looks ancient, wealthy and slightly overdone. The armour, tapestries and long table in the hall belong to the building, not to the set dressers.

What a visit involves. The castle is still owned by descendants of the Montaner family and is lived in, which shapes everything about access. Visits are by guided tour only, on a restricted timetable, and places are arranged in advance rather than sold at the gate; the property also operates as a wedding and concert venue, which closes it on many weekends. The tour covers the courtyard, the arcaded galleries, the chapel and the great hall, and is delivered with an emphasis on the architecture and family history rather than on television. It was declared a national cultural monument in 1949. Photography inside is generally permitted; drones are not.

The concert hall. Domenech designed the great hall with acoustics in mind as much as spectacle, and the castle has run a summer chamber music season for decades, with recitals given under the timber roof to audiences seated among the salvaged Gothic columns. Tickets are sold separately from the daytime tours and are the only routine way to spend an evening inside the building. The programme is announced in spring, the hall holds a few hundred, and the better-known nights are gone within days.

Getting there and timing. Canet de Mar has a station on the Rodalies R1 line from Barcelona, a coastal route that runs almost on the sand for much of its length and takes about an hour from Placa de Catalunya. From the station it is a walk of roughly twenty-five minutes inland, uphill at the end, or a short taxi ride; drivers use the C-32 motorway and park at the castle. Spring and autumn are the comfortable seasons here, since the Maresme is humid in July and August and the interiors are unairconditioned stone. Combining the visit with the Casa Museu Lluis Domenech i Montaner in Canet de Mar itself makes a coherent half-day, since the two buildings are the work of the same architect within sight of each other.