Gaztelugatxe and Game of Thrones

Yes — San Juan de Gaztelugatxe was Dragonstone in Game of Thrones, and it is the reason a tenth-century Basque hermitage started receiving crowds it was never built for.

But three things about that are worth knowing before you go, because they change what you should expect to find.

1. The staircase is real. The castle is not.

What you climb is exactly what was filmed: the stone causeway zigzagging across the water, the 241 steps switchbacking up roughly 100 metres of rock, the headland, the sea. All of that is genuinely there and it needed no enhancement.

The castle was added digitally. The fortress looming over Daenerys in those shots does not exist and never did. At the top of the real staircase there is a small whitewashed hermitage dedicated to Saint John the Baptist, and it is lovely, and it is not a Targaryen stronghold.

Nobody is being deceived here — this is ordinary film-making — but visitors do sometimes arrive expecting a castle.

2. Most Dragonstone scenes were not filmed here at all

The hermitage is small. It could not accommodate a film crew, cameras and lighting, so the interiors were shot on soundstages in Northern Ireland, where the production was based.

Gaztelugatxe supplied the approach, the exterior and the silhouette. Almost everything that happens inside Dragonstone happened indoors, a long way north.

3. The beach scene is somewhere else entirely

This is the one that catches people out.

The famous sequence where Daenerys makes landfall — walking up the sand, touching the ground, the long approach — was filmed at Itzurun Beach in Zumaia, a different part of the Basque coast about an hour away, known for its dramatic layered rock formations.

So if the beach arrival is the image in your head, Gaztelugatxe will not deliver it, because it was never there. There is no beach at Gaztelugatxe. Zumaia is a separate trip.

What you actually get

Having said all that: it delivers.

The reason the location was cast is that it looks like that in real life. The causeway across open water, the staircase clinging to a rock island, the Cantabrian coast dropping away on both sides — that is not a set and it is not enhanced. Plenty of visitors who have never watched an episode find it the best thing they do in the Basque Country.

The show brought the crowds and the permit system. It did not invent the place.

Doing it as a fan without being disappointed

Expect a hermitage, not a fortress. Go for the climb and the coast.

Do not plan around the beach. That is Zumaia, and it is its own day.

Go outside July and August if you want the shots without other people in them. Summer weekends on that staircase are busy enough that the council caps numbers — see tickets and permit.

The classic composition — island, causeway, whole thing laid out — is from the clifftop before you descend, not from the steps. If you only take one photograph, take it there.

And the thousand years before the show

The site has a much longer history than its television career. There has been a hermitage on that rock since around the tenth century, it has been destroyed and rebuilt repeatedly, and the tradition of ringing the bell at the top predates every dragon by a very long way.

Worth a minute at the top thinking about that rather than the CGI.

See day trips to Gaztelugatxe from Bilbao