Girona, Spain

Girona was a Roman town on the Via Augusta before it was a Visigothic and then a Muslim one, and it passed to the Franks at the end of the eighth century, which is why its later history belongs to the Catalan counties rather than to al-Andalus. What survives of each layer is unusually legible in a town this small: a stretch of Roman wall inside the medieval one, the Arab Baths, the Call with its narrow stepped alleys, and a cathedral whose Gothic nave was widened in the fifteenth century to a span no builder had attempted before. The Onyar runs through the middle with the backs of the old houses painted ochre and red above it, which is the view most people know the city by. Since 2016 it has also been known for Game of Thrones, filmed on the cathedral steps and in the lanes of the Call. The city stands at the inland edge of the Costa Brava, and the surrounding comarca is one of the serious centres of contemporary cooking in Spain.