The map of the known world
Places in Game of Thrones
The castles, cities, ruins, and wonders of A Song of Ice and Fire — the seats of the great houses, the Free Cities across the narrow sea, and the older places that were old before any king was crowned. Grouped by continent; each with its own page.
Westeros
- The RiverlandsThe God's EyeA lake so wide a man cannot see across it, sunk in the heart of the riverlands and older, the septons insist, than the Seven who now bless it. At its center broods the Isle of Faces, and on its northern shore stands Harrenhal, which learned the hard way that a lake does not care how tall a man builds beside it.
- The RiverlandsThe Isle of FacesA wooded island in the center of the God's Eye, ringed by weirwoods that wear a carved face for every one of the years since the Pact was sworn upon its shore. No man lands there uninvited and lives to boast of it — or so every maester who has never tried it assures the reader.
- The RiverlandsThe TridentThree forks braided into one great river system — the Green, the Blue, and the Red — that together water half the riverlands and have carried more marching armies than any road in Westeros. Kings have crossed it going both ways; not all of them made the return trip.
- The NorthThe NeckA hundred leagues of black bog and drowned forest strangling the one dry causeway between the North and the rest of Westeros, held not by walls but by mud, fever, lizard-lions, and a people who know every hidden path through it better than any invader ever will.House Reed
- The Neck, the NorthMoat CailinTwenty towers once watched over this causeway; three crumbling stumps do the job now, and do it well enough that no army has forced the Neck from the south in the memory of any maester now living. Ruin, it turns out, is not the same thing as ruined.House Stark
- The Crownlands to the North, and beyondThe KingsroadVery nearly two thousand miles of packed earth and old stone, running from Storm's End to the Wall by way of King's Landing — the closest thing the Seven Kingdoms have to a spine, and about as easy to break.
- The Vale of ArrynThe Vale of ArrynA green bowl of fertile valley walled in on every side by the Mountains of the Moon, reached only through the Bloody Gate — which has never once needed to prove why it carries that name to an invader who got past it.House Arryn
- The RiverlandsThe RiverlandsThe soft, fertile heart of Westeros, laced by the Trident and its tributaries and bounded by nothing at all — which is precisely why every army that has ever marched anywhere in the Seven Kingdoms has, sooner or later, marched through it.House Tully
- The ReachThe ReachThe garden of the Seven Kingdoms, watered by the Mander and gilded with more wheat, wine, and self-regard than any other kingdom can claim — the Reach fields the largest host in Westeros and, its rivals note, very nearly the largest opinion of itself.House Tyrell
- The StormlandsThe StormlandsA hard, rain-lashed country between King's Landing and Dorne, its people bred to weather they never asked for and tempers to match it. Storm's End has never fallen to siege, storm, or dragon, and the stormlanders consider that proof of something, though they rarely agree on what.House Baratheon
- The WesterlandsThe WesterlandsRugged gold country behind Casterly Rock, rich enough that House Lannister's wealth has become a figure of speech in half the Seven Kingdoms — and merciless enough, two rebellious houses learned, that the rains still weep for it in a song sung at nearly every wedding since.House Lannister
- The CrownlandsThe CrownlandsThe smallest of the great regions and, since Aegon planted his standard at the mouth of the Blackwater, the one every other region answers to — a patch of ground that earned its outsized importance the old-fashioned way, at dragonback.House Baratheon
- The Iron IslandsThe Iron IslandsSeven wind-scoured islands off the western coast where the soil gives nothing and the sea gives everything, provided a man is willing to take it by the oar rather than ask for it. The ironborn hold that this is not theft so much as theology.House Greyjoy
- The narrow sea, between Westeros and EssosThe StepstonesA broken chain of rocky islets scattered across the narrow sea between Westeros and Essos, claimed in turn by pirates, princes, and the odd would-be king — roughly in that order of legitimacy. No one has ever held them long, and the maesters suspect no one ever will.
- The CrownlandsDragonstone (the island)A black volcanic island in Blackwater Bay, crowned by the smoking cone of Dragonmont and the castle Valyrian hands raised from its stone before their empire had ever taken much notice of Westeros. It was Targaryen ground before Aegon set foot on the mainland, and in some sense has never quite stopped being so.House Baratheon
- The ReachOldtownThe oldest city in Westeros and, for most of its long history, the grandest — built where the Honeywine meets the sea, in the shadow of a tower that has burned a light out over the water since before anyone thought to write the date down.House Hightower
- The Vale of ArrynGulltownThe Vale's great sea-gate, tucked into a fine harbor at the northern lip of the Bay of Crabs — the port through which the Vale trades with the world it otherwise prefers to ignore behind its mountains.House Grafton
- The RiverlandsMaidenpoolA river-port town on the Bay of Crabs named, so the singers insist, for the pool where Florian the Fool first spied Jonquil bathing with her sisters — a legend the town has never once tired of retelling to visitors who did not ask.House Mooton
Across the Narrow Sea
- The Free CitiesVolantisValyria's eldest daughter, and the least willing to admit the mother is deadThe oldest and proudest of the Free Cities, split between an Old Blood that still dreams of empire and a merchant class that would rather count coin than corpses.
- The Free CitiesPentosThe nearest of the Nine, and the one that pays for its peaceA wealthy, unwalled-by-sword-alone city on Essos's western coast, ruled in name by a prince who exists chiefly to be blamed when the harvest fails.
- The Free CitiesMyrLace, lenses, and crossbows no armorer elsewhere can quite matchA merchant city famed for the finest glasswork, lace, and crossbows in the known world, and for exporting rather more of its sons abroad than it keeps at home.
- The Free CitiesLysThe pleasure city, which trades in beauty the way other cities trade in grainAn island city cultivated for comeliness across generations, whose perfumers, courtesans, and pirate-lords are equally famous across the narrow sea.
- The Free CitiesTyroshThe city of the painted beard, and no shortage of swords for hireA garish, mercenary-exporting Free City whose freeborn men dye their hair and beards every color but the one nature gave them.
- The Free CitiesNorvosWhere three bells rule better than any princeA theocratic Free City where bearded priests hold the true power, and three great bells decide when the rest of Norvos may work, pray, fight, or sleep.
- The Free CitiesQohorThe City of Sorcerers, on the edge of the last great forestThe easternmost Free City, founded as a shrine to a demanding god and famed for smiths who alone still know how to work Valyrian steel.
- The Free CitiesLorathThe least of the Nine, and content to stay that wayThe smallest and coldest of the Free Cities, damp with sea-fog and so seldom mentioned that travelers sometimes forget to count it among the Nine at all.
- Slaver's BayAstaporThe Red City, and the breeding ground of the UnsulliedThe southernmost of the Ghiscari slave cities, built entirely of the same red brick as the eunuch soldiers it is famous for training.
- Slaver's BayYunkaiThe Yellow City, whose chief trade is the training of pleasure slavesA slaving city of crumbling yellow brick on Slaver's Bay's eastern shore, ruled by the Wise Masters and best known for training bed slaves.
- Slaver's BayMeereenThe largest of the Ghiscari cities, and briefly a dragon queen's capitalThe greatest city on Slaver's Bay, built of many-colored brick beneath an eight-hundred-foot pyramid, and for a time the seat of a foreign queen who abolished the slave trade that built it.
- QarthQarthThe greatest city that ever was or ever will be — by its own citizens' modest estimateA wealthy trading city at the gateway between the Summer Sea and the Jade Sea, ruled outwardly by ancient bloodlines and, more quietly, by warlocks who claim their sorcery is not as spent as it looks.
- The Dothraki SeaVaes DothrakThe only city a people who despise cities will admit to keepingA city of wood, hide, and looted idols beneath the Mother of Mountains — the sole permanent settlement the horselords of the Dothraki sea allow themselves.
- ValyriaThe Smoking SeaValyria's grave, and the wreck no sailor's chart is eager to markThe drowned, ash-wreathed ruin of the Valyrian peninsula, sunk beneath the sea in a single night of fire some hundred years before the Targaryen conquest of Westeros.
Which places are covered here?
A selection of the locations the chronicle turns on — the seats and landmarks of Westeros and the great cities of Essos. It is a working gazetteer, not an exhaustive atlas: the places a reader of the novels meets most often, each given its own page.
Are there map coordinates?
No. The maps of the known world are the author's, and their scale is deliberately vague; the chronicle describes where a place stands in relation to its neighbours rather than inventing latitudes the books never give.