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A Game of Thrones Tour in Malta via Public Transport

Back in 2014, I visited Ireland and went on a Game of Thrones tour taking me to various locations, mostly those set in The North such as Winterfell. So naturally when I found cheap flights to Malta, I had to visit the filming sites of King’s Landing. In Ireland, we chose to take a group tour which was a lot of fun and not that expensive. Unfortunately, we were unable to do a group one in Malta as they only ran on weekends. That didn’t stop us though, as instead I organised our own Game of Thrones tour via public transport. We didn’t visit all the sites due to time constraints, but we made it to quite a few of the main ones.

The Sites:

The first stop on our Game of Thrones tour. Mdina Gate.
Mdina Gate – The Entrance to King’s Landing

Mdina Gate

The Mdina gate was used as the entrance to King’s Landing and is where Lady Catelyn Stark rode in on a horse in Episode 3. In reality, it’s the entrance to Mdina which is a beautifully preserved fortified town in the centre of Malta. This was our first stop and we simply took a bus straight from our apartment to just outside the gate. There are plenty of buses that go this route and depending on where you stay, you can either get a direct one or transfer in Valletta.

Mesquita Square. The location of Petyr Baelish's whorehouse and where Jaime Lannister fought Ned Stark. A very easy to find site on our Game of Thrones tour.
The courtyard where Ned Stark fought Jaime Lannister

Mesquita Square

Up next on our Game of Thrones Tour in Malta was the brothel of Petyr Baelish. This is Mesquita Square in Mdina. It was very easy to find as Mdina is not that large. There is a fantastic cafe in Mdina called Fontanella that I would recommend visiting. It serves excellent cakes and have fantastic views.

St Dominic's Convent is a very quiet site and my favourite of those we visited on our Game of Thrones in Malta tour.
St Dominic’s Convent in Rabat

St Dominic’s Convent

This stop is the location where Cersei says to Ned “When you play the Game of Thrones, you win or you die”. In reality, it is St. Dominic’s Convent in Rabat. This location is only a short walk from Mdina and so was easy to squeeze into our trip. When we visited, we were the only people there which was very nice. You can’t actually get into the courtyard, but it was still lovely and very peaceful.

The grand harbour of Valetta. Several forts in the background are key filming locations for Game of Thrones.
The grand harbour of Valletta, with Fort Ricasoli in the background.

Grand Harbour, Valletta

Our next stop was Valletta, and we walked back to Mdina to catch our bus. There are bus stops near St Dominic’s but they were not in use during our visit due to roadworks. From Valletta, we walked to the eastern side for the view of the harbour. From there, can see several forts that were used as filming locations. There was another fort that was on the west side, Fort Manoel, but we didn’t view that one.

The remains of the Azure Window. Final stop on the Game of Thrones in Malta tour.
The remains of the Azure Window

Remains of the Azure Window

The final location in our Game of Thrones tour of Malta was the Azure Window on Gozo. This was the location for Daenerys and Khal Drogo’s wedding. Unfortunately, the Azure Window collapsed in 2017 but you can still visit to see the remains of it. We didn’t visit this part via public transport, but rather via a boat group tour. We had a day trip via Seahorse Cruises and booked their tour of Gozo as it included this as a stop. Despite the Azure Window no longer being there, it’s still included on tours. There were quite a few tourists there and it’s still beautiful even without the arch.

The Cost

All buses in Malta cost 1.50 euros (2 euros during summer) and the ticket can be used multiple times within a 2-hour period. This means that if you time your visits right, you can do it with only a couple tickets.

For our trip, we spent 4.50 euros on buses which was:

Bus to Mdina

Mdina to Valletta

Valletta to Home

We then spent a further 28 euros on the boat trip. It is possible to get to the Azure Window via public transport if you don’t want a boat tour. We were interested in the tour anyway so it was the best option for us.

Total Cost: 32.50 Euros

Other Locations

This was only a small selection of the sites as we didn’t have enough time to view them all. If you wanted to visit more you could take an official Game of Thrones tour or hire a car. Most other locations are still accessible by public transport, they just might also require some walking

To see some of the other locations that we didn’t visit, I recommend this blog post. I used it during my own planning and liked that it referred to specific episodes for each location. For directions, I used Google Maps which also let me know which bus numbers I needed.


I hope that this post will be helpful to those planning their own Game of Thrones tour in Malta. If you have any other questions I would be happy to answer them. You can click here to see more of my posts about Malta.

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13 Comments

    1. I’m planning on re-watching the first Season soon so I can be a pain and shout “I’ve been there!” all the time. When I was in Ireland I visited the forest where they filmed the scene with finding the Direwolves so I can be annoying right from the start.

      It was a fantastic trip though, would definitely recommend it if you can find cheap flights!

  1. I love visiting filming locations! It’s always so much fun to see where something was filmed, and see how the location looks in real life vs the screen. Such a fun activity!

    1. It really makes me want to watch the first season again so I can go “I’ve been there!” which is one of my favourite things to do.

  2. Wow, Malta is gorgeous! Definitely a place I want to visit. Awesome that the bus system is so cheap to get around. I also did a GoT tour in Ireland so would be fun to do one in Malta and Croatia too!

    1. I’ve done one in Ireland too and it was lots of fun! The bus system is great in Malta but they can get very busy so it’s also good to try and time it to avoid rush hour otherwise you’ll probably get stuck in traffic.

  3. I never watched GoT but all these locations look amazing! I’d love to see them with my own eyes.

    It’s amazing that you only paid so little to visit all of these places!

    1. My mum hasn’t seen it either, but she loved all these places and the convent was the only one that we had to go out of our way to visit (and it was worth it too as it was charming and we had it all to ourselves)

  4. So jealous! As a big GOT fan I have to say I have been dying to do a trip like this one! And will say shocked how cheap it actually was!

    Getting all this in my notes to make sure I can knock it out one day!

    1. It was so cheap and honestly the boat tour was something we’d have been doing anyway to visit the Blue Lagoon so I barely spent anything extra doing this. There were a couple other places we could have visited but I didn’t think my family would appreciate me turning it into a Game of Thrones holiday!

  5. I’ve never watch GoT (I know!) – but Malta has long been on my list. Every photo and article I read tells me I need to go there…yours included!

  6. Confessing that I haven’t watched Game of Thrones, however Malta looks great and I do like visiting TV and movie sites. I think my boyfriend would love this place and appreciate it more than I would but it would be a great way to get him excited about traveling somewhere different

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