Peñíscola

Where it sits. Peniscola occupies a rocky promontory on the Costa del Azahar in the Baix Maestrat district, province of Castellon, about 140 kilometres north of Valencia and 75 south of Tarragona. The old town covers a crag of some 64 metres joined to the mainland by a low sandy isthmus — the classic form of a tombolo. Until the fourteenth century the sandbar was intermittent and the rock effectively an island, which is where the name comes from: the Latin paeninsula, by way of the Valencian Peniscola. Whitewashed houses climb the crag in tight terraces beneath the castle, ringed by Renaissance artillery walls, and the sea works at three sides of the rock while a five-kilometre beach runs north from the fourth.

The walls and how to walk them. The fortifications that give the town its silhouette are not medieval but Renaissance, built between 1576 and 1578 to designs by the Italian military engineer Giovanni Battista Antonelli for Philip II, at a moment when Ottoman and Barbary raiding made the Valencian coast genuinely dangerous. They are low, thick and angled for artillery rather than tall and crenellated. A circuit on foot takes in the Portal Fosc, the dark gate that tunnels up into the old town; the Portal de Sant Pere on the harbour side; the Parc d'Artilleria, a terraced garden laid out inside the gun platform; and the Bufador, a natural chasm behind the rock through which the sea forces air with an audible roar in a swell. The Rampa de Felip II carries the main climb from the isthmus to the upper town.

A town with an unusual film history. Peniscola has been a location for longer than most European coastal towns have been photographed. Luis Garcia Berlanga shot Calabuch here in 1956, and Anthony Mann's El Cid used the town extensively in 1961 as the Valencia that Charlton Heston's Rodrigo Diaz besieges and holds; the town has commemorated that shoot ever since. In October 2015 the HBO production of Game of Thrones arrived for its sixth season and dressed the old town as Meereen, the Slaver's Bay city ruled in Daenerys Targaryen's absence:

• Calle Mayor and the walls above Placa Santa Maria appear in the season opener as Tyrion Lannister and Varys walk the streets of a city sliding out of control.
• The Parc d'Artilleria garden appears in the fourth episode, where Tyrion, Missandei and Grey Worm argue over the future of the city.
• The Rampa de Felip II and the ascent to the Portal Fosc carry the same sequence between locations.

The production filmed over about a week and used several hundred local extras.

Papa Luna's town. The castle above, built by the Knights Templar around 1300, became the seat of Benedict XIII — Pedro Martinez de Luna, the Aragonese antipope of the Western Schism — from 1411 until his death here in 1423. He refused to abdicate to the end, and Peniscola functioned for twelve years as one of the three competing papal courts of Latin Christendom, which makes this small fishing town one of only three places in Europe to have been a seat of the papacy. His obstinacy survives in the Spanish idiom seguir en sus trece, to stick to one's guns.

Beaches and the modern town. North of the isthmus, the Platja Nord runs five kilometres of fine sand backed by the apartment blocks that absorbed the tourism boom from the 1970s onward; the shorter Platja Sud faces the harbour and the fishing fleet. Behind the resort strip rises the Serra d'Irta natural park, a dry coastal range of scrub, watchtowers and unpaved tracks running down to small pebble coves — the counterweight to the built-up shoreline and the best walking in the district. The fishing port still lands prawns and cuttlefish daily, and the market and the seafront restaurants trade on them.

Where the fleet lands. The harbour on the southern side still supports a working trawler and net fleet, and the afternoon auction at the fishermen's guild determines what the seafront kitchens serve that evening — red prawn from the Columbretes grounds, cuttlefish, monkfish and the small blue fish on which Valencian cooking depends. It is a genuine port rather than a decorative one, which distinguishes Peniscola from most of the developed coastline to the south.

Getting there and timing. The nearest station is Benicarlo-Peniscola on the Renfe Mediterranean corridor, seven kilometres away and linked by local bus and taxi; Valencia is about ninety minutes by car, Barcelona around two and a half hours. The old town is a steep climb on polished stone with steps at every turn, so it is difficult for wheelchairs and hard work in midsummer heat. May, June and the second half of September give warm sea, workable temperatures and a town that has not been overwhelmed. Arriving early enough to walk the upper lanes before the coach parties reach the castle changes the experience entirely.