Girona to play the game of thrones

Girona, city of stone?

It is now 2015, the fifth sea­son of the se­ries is draw­ing to a close, there is still no sign of the sixth book, and we hear that Girona is going to be a lo­ca­tion in the show next year. So far, few de­tails have been made pub­lic but re­cent local re­ports do pro­vide snatches of in­for­ma­tion. The news, though still un­con­firmed, orig­i­nally ap­peared on the Rac1 radio sta­tion from the pres­i­dent of the En­de­mol en­ter­tain­ment com­pany, Jordi Bosch. We also know from un­named sources close to the pro­ject that film­ing will take place from the end of Au­gust until Sep­tem­ber 21, while sources in the hostelry sec­tor say that hun­dreds of hotel rooms have been booked up over this pe­riod.

Be­yond that, how­ever, we know lit­tle else for sure, al­though there is spec­u­la­tion that Girona will re­place Seville as the lo­ca­tion for the fic­tional re­gion of Dorne, which made its debut this sea­son. Re­ports sug­gest that the GoT pro­gramme mak­ers have been un­happy with their ex­pe­ri­ence in An­dalu­sia. It is pos­si­ble, but in the books (and to an ex­tent in the show) Dorne is de­scribed as hav­ing more of a Mediter­ranean/North African feel, with hot sun and a sandy, moun­tain­ous land­scape, a place re­plete with blood or­ange trees and deadly scor­pi­ons. Doesn't sound much like Girona to me.

Look­ing at the lo­ca­tions in the story that have so far not ap­peared on screen, a much more likely can­di­date for Girona to play is the city of Old­town. Known as the “city of stone” in the story, Old­town is the seat of the Citadel (Girona cathe­dral?), the uni­ver­sity-like in­sti­tu­tion that trains the maesters who are al­lo­cated to each noble fam­ily to pro­vide ad­vice and tech­ni­cal and med­ical as­sis­tance to the lords of Wes­t­eros. Al­ready this sea­son, the char­ac­ter Sam has ex­pressed his wish to be­come a maester and –SPOILER!– in the books, Sam is in­deed sent to Old­town to begin his stud­ies so that he can later re­turn to Cas­tle Black and re­place Aemon as the maester on the Wall. If you run a Google image search on “Old­town” you will find a paint­ing taken from the of­fi­cial Song of Ice and Fire card game that fea­tures the city, show­ing a sky­line of mon­u­men­tal Me­dieval-style build­ings and a river run­ning through the cen­tre spanned by half a dozen stone bridges.

Whether such spec­u­la­tion is right or wrong, we will dis­cover in due course. I am in no hurry be­cause spec­u­lat­ing comes nat­u­rally to Mar­tin's fans and, as the writer began his fan­tasy saga in 1992 and still hasn't fin­ished, so does wait­ing.