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TO THE residents of Osuna, Game of Thrones is more than a TV show. It’s an important part of their history.
HBO chose the small Spanish town, with a population of just 18,000, as the setting for one of season five’s most pivotal scenes. On screen, Osuna’s bullfighting ring became Daznak’s Pit, the massive, Colosseum-like arena from which fan favourite Daenerys Targaryen escaped on the back of a dragon.
The locals are proud of their contribution to the series. But the contribution Game of Thrones has made to their town is just as impressive.
Spain was hit particularly hard by the Global Financial Crisis, and has been struggling to recover ever since. When the show started filming there in late 2014, Osuna’s unemployment rate was at a catastrophic 34 per cent, and it only hosted about 15,000 tourists per year.
Now, less than two years later, tourism has risen by 75 per cent, and Osuna’s residents give Game of Thrones all the credit. They’re doing everything they can to cash in on the show’s popularity, and their timing couldn’t be better, with season five now available on DVD. That means thousands of fans are watching Osuna’s cameo all over again.
The local museum has added a brand new Game of Thrones themed exhibit, which is essentially all the memorabilia you can buy online stuffed into two rooms. As a result, its normal flow of 1000 visitors per month has skyrocketed to 3000.
A few streets away, the restaurant Casa Curro has developed a “special tapas” menu “in honour of Game of Thrones”. It includes eight dishes, such as the Khaleesi (spinach salad with dry tomatoes and avocado), the Melisandre (a smoked salmon, cheese and raspberry tartlet) and the Lannister (venison hotpot with black beer and red derries). They’re all suitably delicious.
The restaurant and museum both feature walls full of photos, which show excited locals alongside the various Game of Thrones cast members. Emilia Clarke, who plays Daenerys, is the most popular by far.
But by Spanish standards (the country is generally mad about Game of Thrones), Osunans were surprisingly grounded around some of the world’s most famous actors.
“It is a rural town, they didn’t know about the show. They respected the privacy of the actors,” says Alejandro, our Spanish tour guide.
“(The extras) were dressed as Unsullied. They were like, ‘What is this, a movie of Romans?’
“Emilia Clarke had a birthday party in a bar there. There were no pictures! Imagine that.”
That begs the question: Why did Game of Thrones decide to visit a town with virtually no knowledge of the show?
Producer Duncan Muggoch is one of the select few people who get to choose the filming locations. He says seemingly obscure details can be incredibly important — and one such detail helped Osuna secure its place in season five.
“We couldn’t find a good fighting pit in Croatia (where other Meereen scenes have been filmed),” Duncan says. But the bull ring in Osuna was perfect, because like most other buildings in the town, it was constructed with a particular type of yellow stone.
“The stone matched the colour of Meereen. We’d have to build that otherwise,” he says. “You can only afford to do maybe 10 really impressive sets per season ... We wanted to do Spain cheaply.”
Game of Thrones reportedly boasts a budget of roughly $6 million per episode, but cost is still a significant factor. Osuna told HBO it could use the bull ring free of charge, as long as it employed locals as extras and used materials from the region for the sets. That arrangement suited everyone.
The filming wasn’t without incident. On day one, after more than a month of meticulous preparation, dangerous winds knocked over a 60-metre green screen that had been erected around the ring, forcing everything to an abrupt halt.
But in the end, the deal worked out perfectly for HBO, and even better for Osuna. More than 550 locals got gigs as extras, and that figure doesn’t include anyone who worked behind the scenes.
Filming doesn’t always go so smoothly. Just compare Osuna’s experience to that of Seville, a major Spanish city just an hour down the road. Seville’s Royal Alcazar Gardens also appeared in season five, acting as the famous water gardens of Dorne, and the locals were very excited about it from day one.
“The fans, particularly the young ones, were ... distressing,” Alejandro says. “The southern Spanish culture, they like to touch.”
Hundreds of those fans would line up outside the Alcazar, hoping to get inside and catch a glimpse of the actors. On one day of shooting, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, who plays Jaime Lannister, was late and got caught in the throng.
“The security guard told him no, you have to wait. He’d forgotten his ID. He decided to wait outside,” Alejandro says. “He paid, actually, to enter.”
Coster-Waldau “enjoyed being a common person” that day, Alejandro says, but the enthusiastic fan base did go too far at times. At one point, the entire cast had to move hotels to preserve their privacy and security after locals figured out where they were staying and “were camping outside”.
Inside the Alcazar, HBO had to be just as careful, because it didn’t want to damage such a historic site.
“We had protective floors covering everything,” Duncan says. “All the equipment had tennis balls on the feet.
“You have to close the monument for a month, and then you have to be really careful.” In one of the palace’s small rooms, they had to fit “something like seven or eight cast, along with 15 crew”.
The setting’s historical importance led to some painful headaches for the producers, but that’s also what made the Alcazar such a perfect location for Dorne’s scenes.
“There’s a mix of different influences in the gardens. Renaissance, the French romantic garden, plus the English romantic garden, all on top of Islamic influences,” Alejandro says.
“Game of Thrones is set in a world like the European Middle Ages. That’s OK for six of the seven kingdoms,” he says. “We have to look for a Middle Ages type place, but that looks different.
“We are a land of mixing. And that’s Dorne.”
The Game of Thrones themed tour in Seville has been running since Spring of 2015, and it does good business. But you get the sense Game of Thrones got more out of Seville than vice versa. It’s a place steeped in history — the Alcazar palace was built by a king, after all — and without the show, life in Seville would have continued in pretty much the same way.
You can’t say that about Osuna. The smaller town needed a lifeline after the financial crisis, and in Game of Thrones, it found something to latch onto.
Tourist officials are already working on a new project. They want to create a virtual reality “flying dragon” experience, which will let visitors view the bullfighting ring through Daenerys’s eyes — on the back of a dragon.
The difference is, ahem, stark. For Seville, Game of Thrones’ visit is a piece of trivia. For Osuna, it’s a piece of history — and the town is still trying to make the most of it.
Game of Thrones season five is available now on DVD. Season six starts on Monday, April 25.
Sam travelled to Spain courtesy of HBO. If you’re interested, the tour through Seville and Osuna can be booked here.
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Ever in search of luxury, Varun heads to Abadia Reuterta leDomaine in Spain.
Originally published as Game of Thrones: What you never see
