There's more to Dubrovnik than Game of Thrones, but it's a great prism for seeing the city's history

One of the great joys of small group travel is the affordability of a dedicated guide. Funding a day of exclusive attention when travelling as a couple, or on your own, rarely makes financial sense. When you're splitting fees by four, it becomes logical.

While still a bit more expensive than standard group tours you can pick up on Trip Advisor, a little more money spent by our foursome on a dedicated guide inevitably returns enormous benefits. We get excursions crafted to our interests, form great relationships with our guides and have the flexibility to go off piste, whether in topic or locations. And we inevitably walk away with top tips for bars, restaurants and shopping. I'm convinced that our increasing use of private guides is one of the reasons that our annual girls' trips seem to get better every year.

It's probably impossible to tour Dubrovnik these days without talking about Game of Thrones. Croatia's not just a filming location; the show has spawned a whole new industry here. Shops bristle with themed items, costumed mannequins put characters on the street and dedicated boutiques will snap your photo on a full-size copy of the iron throne if you buy something. With three of the four of us being devoted fans of the fantasy epic, a dedicated tour was a must. But how to choose from the more than 25 options on Trip Advisor? Fortunately, one of us had past experience and hooked us up with Magnus Regis, a small company of locals who are all qualified guides, only do private tours and add professional backgrounds in history and archaeology to their passion for GOT.

Dubrovnik's walled centre is one of those places, like Venice and Bruges, that was once hugely prosperous but then forgotten by history.  There's little in your immediate view more modern than the 17th century. The most glorious buildings have the pointed windows and sinuous stone carving of those high Gothic merchant empires who linked East and West. Centuries of traffic have polished the white limestone streets to a brilliant shine like marble. The city insists that all signage must be worked into glass panels on uniform lanterns that hang above all the doorways, giving a pleasing uniformity to the streets.

No wonder directors love the place as a film set; It takes very little to conjure up another world. In addition to GOT, Dubrovnik has been the location for a soon-to-be-released version of Robin Hood, was the casino city of Canto Bight in Star Wars: The Last Jedi, hosts the currently-running Templar drama Knightfall and stood in for Venice in David Tennant's version of Casanova.  The Croats are also very canny business people. They scooped GOT off Malta at the end of Season 1, undercutting Maltese pricing, offering cheap and enthusiastic extras and massive additional support to the production team. They played the long game. They believed they didn't need to make money off the shoots themselves. The cash would come from the tourism that followed. They were right.

HALLOWED SPOTS AND HOT HISTORY
We started in the old town with Magnus Regis owner and founder Tom Matana. At the heart of the tour is a simple but effective strategy: you walk around, your guide gets you to a particular point, then holds up the appropriate page from a book of laminated scene shots from the show that are taken from the exact spot at which you're standing. He reminds you which season the action took place in, what's going on, and often gives you some insight into the movie magic that finished the transformation from modern Croatia to fantasy Westeros.

Good news for the GOT uninitiated: the last bit is fascinating even for people who have never seen the show. Look at how carefully this shot was framed to cut out the Christian imagery above the building's doors. (Even if there had been saints in Westeros, it's doubtful there'd be one above the door of Littlefinger's brothel.) Check out the artful addition of ivy and potted plants to cover those modern drainpipes and power lines. Look carefully here to see how the same guy appears in this scene multiple times; they filmed it with a much smaller group and duplicated it to form a crowd. Yes, those are the stairs Cersei descended in her walk of shame, but this is how they used giant green screens to block out the Jesuit church and university building at the top, and replace them with a painted version of the great sept.

Also good for non-viewers, the GOT sets are a prism through which you can explore all of this city's history, and because it's a private tour your guide can give you as much or as little as you're interested in. Standing on the old town's western heights (the walled centre is essentially a v-shaped cleft with the main business district on the flat bottom and steep, stair-stepped residential streets rising on either side) you can see by colour which tile roofs were replaced after bombing in the Bosnian war, and how terrifyingly close the ridge is from which the Serbs were attacking the town. Almost 300 Croatians died and more than 50% of the buildings in the old town were damaged (including the burning of seven Baroque palaces) and yet many visitors ... particularly non-Europeans under 35 ... are so totally unaware of the history that they think HBO paid for all those red roofs to give Kings' Landing a more uniform look. I was delighted to see so little evidence of conflict just 23 years after the end of a horrific war, particularly in a population far more interested in making a prosperous future than in re-hashing the offenses of the past. But as America descends into increasing factionalism, I couldn't help hearing Tom's stories about young tourists' ignorance and remembering that phrase about those who don't know history being doomed to repeat it. But I digress...

You'll learn why the broad, straight main street of the Stradun is so uniform: it had been the moat of an earlier, smaller version of the walled town, then was filled in and built on when the town expanded. The soft substructure made everything above it collapse in the calamitous earthquake of 1667, after which the town fathers mandated that everything be replaced to a master plan. Christopher Wren and London, eat your heart out. The number of showy churches and monasteries seems out of proportion to the place; we learned that the merchants of Dubrovnik were always flying close to the edge of Papal tolerance as they put friendly, business-enhancing relationships over religious disputes with their Islamic neighbours. Thus the church kept installing officials to keep an eye on them. The Croat's claim to have invented the cravat ... and through that, the necktie ... as tokens lovers tied around each others' necks before one went away to war. There's a museum here on the topic and shops selling gorgeous modern interpretations. Given the town's roots in trade, it's probably not

surprising that it also boasts one of the world's oldest continuously-operating pharmacies, from which you can still buy luxurious creams made with local roses and herbs.

And, of course, you'll also see the entire route of Cersei's walk of shame, the location of numerous street scenes and the exquisite little harbour that turns up in poignant moments of arrival and departure. We skipped the Red Keep (aka Lovrijenac Fort) because, this being the worst weather day of our trip, we were all soaked to the skin and the rain-slicked ascent looked dangerous. Time to switch to part two of the tour, which featured a handoff to driver/guide Neno and the comforts of a warm, dry car to explore some sets on the outskirts.

BEYOND THE WALLS
If you're only visiting Dubrovnik, it's possible that you'll never leave the walled old town except for airport transfers. This would be a mistake. The GOT extended tour is an excellent way to get a taste of the broader countryside.

Your first stop is the Trsteno Arboretum, 12 miles Northwest up the coast. The drive gives you a chance to appreciate Dubrovnik's impressive commercial and cruise ports, wisely screened by a line of hills from the old town, and a dramatic modern suspension bridge from which you can bungee jump if you're keen on adventure sports.

But the real attraction is the coastline itself. While the views from the walled town are fantastic, it's only by driving for a while that you appreciate just how expansive and beautiful the string of islands lying off the coast is. You don't get anywhere fast; this coastline could have been a piece of aluminium foil crumpled in a giant's hand, so deep and irregular are its bays. Rounding each gives different views of small villages and rocky hills covered with grape vines, olives, pomegranate trees and bougainvillea. You don't have to go many miles from Dubrovnik for the country to feel sparsely populated.

The Trsteno Arboretum was the country estate of a wealthy merchant family from Dubrovnik's glory days. In the middle 16th century, as a passion for exploring swept around Europe, the family's garden-mad patriarch asked his sea captains to return from trading missions with plants and seeds. Instead of the usual ballast, they filled their holds with topsoil from rich destinations so the boss could improve the poor base of his garden. Thus, despite years of neglect under the communists and a couple of disastrous fires, the garden is packed by an unusual number of exotic plants, from Asian bamboo to South American agaves. The place sprawls down a steep hill, with an aqueduct bringing water through an impressive fountain at the top, what's left of a summer palace in the middle and a private dock along the rocky shore below. A seasoned British garden and country house explorer is likely to be a bit underwhelmed; original planned beds and borders have lapsed into a benign neglect and the house is a mouldering ruin after the double hit of communist rule and war damage. Presumably the laid-back attitude to maintenance and conservation was an attraction for HBO, who were even allowed to gouge out part of the cliff face along the coast road to get their supply trucks in.

The production team certainly got their money's worth. An area not much bigger than a square mile shows up as the Tyrell family seat of High Garden, the gardens of the royal palace in King's Landing, some harbour scenes and even as the majestic seaside promontory on which Bron taught Jamie to fight again after losing his hand. (The latter was a perfect example of why you need a guide. Even standing 50 yards from the spot, you'd never discover it on your own as it meant climbing up a weed-pocked flight of steps, cutting through a yard of decaying boating equipment and slipping through a break in a wall and down some steps cut into the sea-side boulders to discover this dramatic scene.) Most memorable to many viewers will be the gazebo and another patio, both hanging over the sea, with remarkable views. Diana Rigg, who dominated most of the scenes filmed here, certainly pulled one of the better assignments by doing a lot of her shoots here. I didn't remember just how much nefarious plotting took place in the calming surrounds of gardens until we wandered Trsteno. It's no doubt a riff of the theme of beautiful-on-the-outside-rotten-within that shows up so often in GOT.

UP ON THE ROOF
Our penultimate stop required a return to Dubrovnik and the ascent of a series of hairpin turns cut into limestone cliffs to reach a high promontory that stretches above the old town. These are the heights from which the Serbs bombarded town, and the Croats tried to stop them ... with a few hundred yards of no man's land on the ridge between. It's one of the few places you'll still see war damage, as little has been rebuilt up here and the pockmarked land between is still rubble overgrown with weeds. We walked out to the edge of the cliff for an extraordinary view; it's as if you're hovering over the walled town and its bay like a gliding falcon. On a sunny day this would be one of the world's great picnic spots, but on our visit it was dangerously windy and lashing with rain. We beat a quick retreat.

Part of the ridge is covered by a long, straight bit of road bordered by a formal allée of trees. It's an oddly aristocratic touch to a fairly desolate area. Running beside it is a long, now-ruined complex of Napoleonic stables (different century, different invaders).  This area provided the backdrop for lots of travel scenes and meetings outside of Kings' Landing, including that touching moment when Brienne of Tarth and Podrick set off on their quest to help the Stark girls.

The final site was another proof point as to why a guide is essential. At the end of a long string of hotels and holiday villas along Dubrovnik's Eastern Bay, inaccessible except from a footpath behind a shuttered church, is a derelict hotel. The Belvedere was, for a just six years, the poster child for Yugoslavia's attempt to be an outward-facing, attractive, commercially savvy face of communism. The five-star luxury resort was an early casualty of the war and has been a hulking ruin since 1991, now overgrown with plants and its crumbling walls covered with graffiti. Part of the hotel's luxurious set up was a series of terraced patios flowing down the hill to a round arena hanging above the water of the Adriatic, with a clear view of the walled town across the bay. It must have been remarkable in its day.

And it was indeed remarkable as the setting for the trial by combat between Oberyn Martell and the Mountain. This is the place least likely to interest someone who hasn't seen the series. But for those of us who had, it wasn't hard to let your imagination return you to the majesty and the horror of that moment.

How long the arena will be on the GOT tour is an interesting question. The old Belvedere complex is now owned by a Russian oligarch who wants to tear the whole thing down and build a palace of opulence to match Dubai's bid for seven-star luxury. The problem: Croatian law demands public access to the seashore. Until the oligarch can assure his guests of complete privacy, he won't break ground. So the old Belvedere continues to crumble, and with a knowledgeable guide you can sneak  in to see one of GOT's most iconic film sets.

Note: You can also customise your full day trip with a boat ride to Lokrum Island, doppelgänger for the city of Qarth and reputed to be a place with excellent beaches for summer swimming. As it was a sodden day in November, we passed on this option.