Game of Thrones: King's Landing in Dubrovnik

The first scene of the second season was shot here: the celebration of King Joffrey's name day. The captive Sansa saves the drunkard Ser Dontos Hollard by getting Joffrey to make him a fool. Later in the same episode Cersei and Littlefinger argue about the nature of power in the fort's porch, and in the season finale the royal family takes refuge on its inner terrace to escape the mob. The fort still stands where it did: 37 metres above the sea outside the western wall, a stronghold and a theatre, with Non Bene Pro Toto Libertas Venditur Auro cut over the gate.

Visitor guidance: The fort overshadows the Pile Gate, the city's landward entrance, and still stages plays during the Dubrovnik Summer Festival.

Tyrion and Bronn walk these ramparts in the third-season premiere, and the second-season montage of Robert's bastards plays out beneath them. David Benioff's reaction on first seeing the city: "The minute we started walking around the city walls we knew that was it." The fortifications do the work the models cannot — the Red Keep and the Sept of Baelor are computer-generated, the walls are the real thing. Almost two kilometres of them ring the old town.

Location precision: The production used the walls as a whole; the pin marks a wall tower on the landward section above the old town.

Visitor guidance: Enter at the Pile Gate on the west side and follow the land walls round to the Ploče Gate.

The season two finale sends a princess out of King's Landing, and the shore below the western wall plays the farewell. Myrcella Baratheon is packed off to Dorne for her marriage alliance with House Martell; the departure was filmed on the seashore between Fort Bokar and Fort Lovrijenac. The fort the scene is named for is the real thing — Michelozzo built its two-storey casemate in 1461 to 1463 as the key point in the defence of the Pile Gate, and its round mass still juts out of the wall line above the rocks.

Location precision: The shot used the seashore between the two forts; the pin marks Fort Bokar at its western end.

Visitor guidance: The fort is right by the Pile Gate on the seaward side of the walls, and is best seen from the shore or from the wall walk above it.

The riot sequence of the season two finale was filmed in the Pile Gate's inner gateway, the Gothic arch just inside the city's landward entrance. It starts when Joffrey, riding through Flea Bottom, is struck in the face with manure and orders his guards to kill the crowd; Sansa is nearly gang-raped by the mob and rescued by the Hound, and Tyrion, newly Hand, slaps the king and gets nowhere. The gate is still the way in: a wooden drawbridge still spans the dry moat, whose garden is a quiet patch of green on the approach.

Visitor guidance: The inner gateway is the passage from the moat into the old town; Fort Lovrijenac rises directly above it.

Not King's Landing but Qarth, in the same finale: the Rector's Palace, seat of the government of the old Ragusan republic, became the atrium of the Spice King. Daenerys comes to it begging ships from one of Qarth's ruling Thirteen and is rebuffed; by the time she is back at Xaro's mansion her guards and her handmaiden Irri are dead and her dragons are gone. The filmed atrium still holds its bust of Miho Pracat, the shipowner from the island of Lopud who left Dubrovnik his wealth — the Senate raised his monument here in 1638.

Visitor guidance: The palace is entered from the main street; its rooms have housed the city's history museum since 1872.

North-west of Dubrovnik, the Trsteno Arboretum stood in for the Red Keep's palace gardens in the third and fourth seasons. One of the scenes played on its terraces is Varys's short warning to Tyrion about Shae, a conversation on a garden path. The garden is far older than the fiction: the Gozze family began planting it in the late fifteenth century, and the aqueduct built to irrigate it in 1492 still carries water. Two Oriental Planes over five centuries old stand in the village square, undamaged by the shelling of 1991 and the forest fire of 2000.

Visitor guidance: The arboretum belongs to the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts and still has a fifteenth-century summer residence inside the park.

Above the village of Klis, the fortress doubled for the fictional city of Meereen. It stands on the pass that separates the mountains Mosor and Kozjak, eleven kilometres from the Adriatic Sea. Fourth-season Meereen is the one where Drogon never comes home: a grieving father carries the charred bones of his three-year-old daughter into court and Daenerys, racked with guilt, chains her other dragons in the catacombs. Inside the fortress today there is a museum of arms, armour and traditional uniforms.

Visitor guidance: The fortress museum is open above the village of Klis, eleven kilometres inland from Split.

In October 2014 the crew of the fifth-season finale filmed the walk of atonement on the Jesuit stairs, above the city's main street. Having admitted her adultery to the High Sparrow, Cersei is made to walk naked the length of her own capital while the crowd jeers and throws rubbish: six minutes on screen, shot with 500 extras, a body double for Lena Headey and, in places, her face pasted onto the double's body. The street below is the Stradun, where the Renaissance Sponza Palace now houses the national archives. The episode aired on 14 June 2015.

Location precision: The scene was shot on the Jesuit stairs above the Stradun; the pin marks a building on that street.

Visitor guidance: The Jesuit stairs are in the old town, a short walk from the Stradun, the main street.