A fortress people know only as Highgarden
Almodóvar del Río Castle rises on a hilltop 24 km from Córdoba city, on the Guadalquivir's left bank[1]. The current structure dates to 760, raised on the site of an earlier Roman fort[2]. For most visitors today, the castle means one thing: Highgarden, seat of House Tyrell in Game of Thrones' seventh season, with the fortress's own dungeon doubling as Casterly Rock in the same episodes[3].
That's a reasonable way to first hear about the place, but it treats one production as the whole story. By the time HBO's crews arrived, Almodóvar Castle had already spent three decades as a working film location, and it kept working long after they left. The chronology, not the resemblance, is what makes this castle unusual.
1986: Ava Gardner's reputed last film, and a village of extras
The castle's most storied production predates Game of Thrones by three decades: Harem, a 1986 TV movie starring Ava Gardner, Omar Sharif and Julian Sands. The crew cast the eighth-century fortress as a Sultan's palace and let the Guadalquivir stand in for the Bosphorus, the kind of geographic substitution period dramas lean on when the real setting isn't available to film in[4]. The interior scenes and gardens were shot elsewhere, mostly at Seville's Casa de Pilatos and Reales Alcázares.
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Almodóvar Castle
Game of Thrones fortress 30 min from Córdoba. Medieval dungeons, Umayyad towers and panoramic Guadalquivir views await inside the ramparts. Book from €11.
It was, by most accounts, the last movie Ava Gardner ever made[6]. The production spent seven days in Córdoba province, and Gardner herself stayed at the Parador La Arruzafa[7]. The shoot also left a mark on the town: 200 local extras and 120 cast and crew worked alongside the production, at a moment when Almodóvar del Río's economy still leaned heavily on cotton farming[5].
2019: Netflix returns, with the same casting call
Warrior Nun, Netflix's supernatural drama, filmed at the castle for five days in July 2019, drafting local men and women from Almodóvar del Río to play barbarians and novices[9]. The same casting team that had staffed Game of Thrones roughly three years earlier handled the call again[8], a small detail worth noting: whoever cast Córdoba's most famous shoot came back for the next one, and went looking for extras from the same town, much as Harem had drawn its 200 locals a generation before[5].
The series' lead, Portuguese actress Alba Baptista, was joined by Tristán Ulloa and Joaquim de Almeida[10], and the wider shoot ranged across Málaga, Antequera, Ronda, Marbella, Seville and Almodóvar del Río[11], six corners of Andalusia stitched into one production, of which the castle was only one stop.
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For the architectural case behind HBO's choice of location, rather than the production trivia, the real building tradition behind Game of Thrones' Dorne covers that ground in full.
A commercial, a chronology, and a castle that kept working
The confirmed screen credits don't stop at two productions. The castle has also appeared in at least one vintage drinks commercial, though few verifiable details about the shoot survive online. Treat it as a plausible, lightly documented entry in a longer list, not a dated fact on the same footing as Harem or Warrior Nun.
What the record does support is a genuine arc rather than a single viral resemblance. A fading Ottoman drama in 1986. A Netflix series in 2019. A Tyrell stronghold somewhere in between. Three very different productions, more than thirty years apart, chose the same hilltop fortress for the same reason: it looks like nowhere else in Spain, and it sits a manageable half hour past the last motorway exit from Córdoba.
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Anyone building a longer day out around the castle can pair it with Medina Azahara, the UNESCO-listed caliphal city 8 km outside the city, a site with its own, considerably older claim on Córdoba's history, film crews or not.