Pippin, Merry and I spent the last two weeks travelling together. We went to Bordeaux, Bilbao, Gaztelugatxe, Carcassonne and Lyon – Bordeaux, Bilbao, Carcasonne and Lyon will get their own post soon, because this one is going to focus on Gaztelugatxe. If the title hasn’t given it away, here’s why: because it was partially used for the filming of the scenes in Dragonstone on Game of Thrones, most notably the stairs, and because we’re nerds, that’s the only reason we drove that far in the first place. No regrets. It was beautiful.
San Juan de Gaztelugatxe is a monastery in Basque Country in Spain, not so far from Bilbao, which is why we stayed in Bilbao and drove up from there. The castle isn’t real, of course, which is a bummer – why are the castles never real? And there were no dragons, which is also a bummer. They would have been super useful and could have helped avoid all those damn stairs… oh, well. Good thing we have functioning legs.
