Before the show decamped to Croatia and the studios of Belfast took the North, the original King’s Landing was Maltese. Game of Thrones shot its entire first season across the islands in 2010, and for fans the pleasure is that these are not sets glimpsed from a tour bus but real, walkable places you can stand inside a gate you can pass through, a fort you can see across the water, a clifftop where a khal once married a queen.
How and when Season One was made
Game of Thrones was HBO’s adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s novels, developed by showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss. After a troubled, reshot pilot, the first full season was filmed through the second half of 2010 and premiered in April 2011 the series that would define a decade of television began, in part, right here. Production split between two worlds: Northern Ireland, where Belfast’s studios and damp green countryside built the North and Winterfell, and Malta, whose sun, stone and sea stood in for the Mediterranean heart of the story King’s Landing, the Red Keep, and the Dothraki coast where Daenerys is wed. The grand interiors, like the throne room, were studio sets in Belfast; Malta did the sunlit exteriors, which is exactly why the locations here are places you can still walk.
The locations, walked
Four Maltese settings carried most of the season’s southern story, and all but the active forts are easy to visit today.
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Mdina | the gate to King’s Landing
The most recognisable shot is the arched main gate of Mdina, which doubled as the entrance to King’s Landing. Walk through it as Ned Stark did and you are immediately in the Silent City’s hushed, car-…
Fort Manoel | the Great Sept of Baelor
Out in Marsamxett Harbour, on Manoel Island, sits the star-shaped Fort Manoel, built by the Knights in the eighteenth century and, in the show, the Great Sept of Baelor. This was the stage for one o…
San Anton Gardens | the Red Keep gardens
In the village of Attard, the lush, public San Anton Gardens stood in for the gardens of the Red Keep, the setting for several of King’s Landing’s quieter courtly scenes. Unlike the forts, these garde…
Dwejra, Gozo | the Dothraki wedding
On Gozo’s wild west coast, the spectacular Dwejra coastline hosted the wedding of Daenerys Targaryen and Khal Drogo, staged beneath the great natural arch known as the Azure Window. The arch collapsed…
Why only one season?
From the second season onward, King’s Landing moved to Dubrovnik on the Croatian coast, and the show never returned to Malta. The reasons were a mix of the practical and the unfortunate. As King’s Landing grew into a sprawling capital, Dubrovnik’s intact medieval walls offered a ready-made walled city at the scale the expanding production needed, and cost and logistics played their part. There was controversy, too: during filming at the protected Dwejra site, contractor work damaged a sensitive, legally protected habitat, prompting an official investigation and a fine. Whatever the precise weighting of factors, Season One remains Malta’s single, golden contribution to the saga — which is part of what makes the locations feel so special to stand in.
Why Malta is a film-maker’s dream
Game of Thrones was neither the first nor the last production to discover what the industry calls “Mini Hollywood.” Malta’s appeal is built into the landscape. The Knights of St John spent 268 years turning the islands into some of the most heavily fortified places on earth, leaving honey-limestone cities — Valletta, Mdina, the Three Cities that read on camera as ancient Rome, the Crusader east or a fantasy capital with almost no set-building required. Add a deep natural harbour, dramatic cliffs, open countryside and prehistoric temples all within an hour’s drive, and a director has a back lot the size of a country.
The practicalities seal it: around three hundred days of sunshine and long, consistent Mediterranean light; the historic water tanks at Rinella, purpose-built for sea sequences; experienced English-speaking crews in an EU member state; and a generous cash rebate that has made Malta increasingly competitive for major productions. The pedigree speaks for itself from the 1980 Popeye, whose set became a village you can still visit, through Gladiator, Troy, Munich, The Count of Monte Cristo, Captain Phillips, World War Z and Murder on the Orient Express, to Gladiator II. Game of Thrones simply added the most famous gate in television to the list.
Walking the locations in a day
Malta’s size means you can see most of it in a single day. Start in Mdina in the cool of the morning, when the Silent City is at its emptiest and most atmospheric, and walk the gate and the lanes. At midday, take in Fort Manoel’s silhouette from the Sliema seafront across the water, pausing at San Anton Gardens in Attard along the way. If you want the full set and a magnificent day in its own right cross to Gozo for the Dwejra coast, where the Dothraki wedding was filmed. Morning in the capital of the Seven Kingdoms, afternoon on the edge of the Dothraki Sea: not a bad day’s travel.
