Game of Thrones tourism in Dubrovnik, five years after the finale

The show that rewired a city’s tourism

Game of Thrones finished filming its final scenes in Dubrovnik in 2018 and aired its last episode in May 2019. The show had been using the city since 2011, when it appeared in the second season as King’s Landing — the capital city of the fictional Seven Kingdoms of Westeros. Over eight years of production, a significant proportion of the most watched moments in the most watched television series in history were set against the limestone walls, baroque streets, and Adriatic backdrop of what the rest of the world knew as a beautiful Croatian city.

In 2019, during the final season’s broadcast, Dubrovnik received somewhere around 850,000 visitors. The relationship between those numbers and the show is not a simple linear correlation — the city had been growing its tourism substantially before GoT — but the directional effect is not in serious doubt.

Four years on from the finale, it is worth asking what that tourism actually looks like, whether the wave has crested, and what a visitor specifically interested in the filming connection will find.

What the locations actually are

The principal Dubrovnik filming locations for King’s Landing are documented in exhaustive detail by now, but a brief summary is useful. The city walls — particularly the seaward sections near Fort Lovrijenac — appear repeatedly as the approaches to the city. The Pile Gate area and the streets immediately inside it stand in for various parts of the capital. The Stradun appears, modified in post-production. Fort Lovrijenac, the stone fortress perched on a rock west of the Pile Gate, was used for the Red Keep exteriors.

The Jesuit Staircase leading from Gundulićeva Poljana to the Church of St Ignatius was used for the infamous “Shame” scene in series five. Lokrum island hosted an Iron Throne prop display for several years as a GoT-licensed tourism venture. The Trsteno Arboretum north of the city doubled as the gardens of the Red Keep in the scenes with the Tyrells.

The dedicated tour industry, five years on

The GoT touring industry in Dubrovnik has not wound down since the finale; if anything, it has professionalized. The show’s availability on streaming has introduced new cohorts of viewers who came to it after the broadcast ended, and the depth of the fan base — particularly internationally — has remained substantial.

The most direct version is the original 15-hour Game of Thrones walking tour that covers the major King’s Landing filming locations in the Old Town with a guide who has detailed knowledge of which scenes were filmed where. The Lokrum Island Game of Thrones experience adds the boat trip to the island where the Iron Throne prop was displayed and where several series-one scenes were filmed.

What these tours offer that self-guided location-hunting does not is the layered context: not just “this is where X happened” but why this particular location was chosen, what modifications the production team made, and what the same space looks like in its non-fictional role as a medieval monument. The guides who do this well — and several of the operators in Dubrovnik have been doing it since 2013 — can make the visit work for both the GoT enthusiast and the companion who has not watched the show.

The city’s own relationship with the franchise

Dubrovnik has been, at various points, ambivalent about its GoT identity. City officials in the 2016–2019 period made consistent statements about not wanting Dubrovnik to become primarily identified as a filming location rather than as a historical and cultural site. The Respect the City crowd-management initiative was partly a response to the GoT-amplified tourism wave.

At the same time, the economic impact of GoT tourism was substantial. A 2019 study estimated the direct contribution of GoT-related tourism at around 10% of the city’s total tourism revenue — a significant figure for a city where tourism already represented a large proportion of the local economy.

By 2023, the position has settled into something more pragmatic. The GoT licensing relationship generates revenue. The tours are a significant part of the tour operator industry. The city’s identity as King’s Landing is permanently embedded in the global cultural memory of the show’s era. Pretending otherwise would be strange.

What the city has become better at is contextualising GoT tourism within the larger offer rather than letting it dominate. The filming locations do not have permanent signage that subordinates the historical narrative to the fictional one. The kings-landing filming spots guide mentions both the show and the underlying history. Visitors who come for the show and stay for the actual city are the happy outcome.

House of the Dragon and the next wave

House of the Dragon, the Game of Thrones prequel series that began broadcasting in 2022, did not film in Dubrovnik. The production chose different locations — primarily in the UK, Spain, and Portugal. This was noted with some relief by the Dubrovnik tourism management establishment, which had some interest in reducing the intensity of GoT-related visitor concentration.

Whether House of the Dragon’s success translates into a renewed wave of GoT-original-series tourism to Dubrovnik is not yet fully clear by mid-2023. Anecdotally, our experience visiting in September 2023 was that the GoT tours were well attended but not as visibly dominant as they had been in 2018 and 2019. The visitors who came specifically for the filming locations felt like a substantial but not majority subset of the total.

What you will actually experience

A visit to the GoT filming locations in Dubrovnik in 2023 is a well-organised, historically grounded, and genuinely interesting experience — partly because the underlying locations are excellent regardless of fictional association. Lovrijenac fortress is worth visiting because it is a remarkable piece of medieval military architecture on a dramatic rock above the sea, not because it doubled as the Red Keep.

The Stradun at dawn — the essay we wrote about that early morning — is what it is regardless of what was filmed there. The walls are the walls.

The GoT connection adds a layer for people who want it. For those who do not, it recedes easily. The city that was there before the cameras arrived is still there, and it remains the better story.