Discover which real places were used to create Hogwarts School on the big screen and if you feel like it, know that they can be visited!
Hogwarts, its Houses, its teachers and its most secret corners remain emblematic of the Harry Potter saga, both literary and cinematographic! And if the author JK Rowling herself had drawn the map of the place for the needs of the film crew, the decorators must have found a real castle to serve as the exterior of the building.
The filming of most of the scenes in the courtyard – notably the broom lessons or the students chatting while walking under the arcades – were filmed on Alnwick Castle :
alnwickcastle.com
There Durham Cathedral was also used for the wide shots of the castle, retouched using special effects to add roofs to the numerous turrets:
Durhamcathedral.co.uk
Hogwarts School also benefited from a model based on the plans and architecture of the castle and the cathedral, in order to maintain consistency between the two buildings and allow overall shots of the school to be filmed. This will also significantly reduce costs. Because if Alnwick is used in the first three films of the magical saga, the scenes at the castle will mainly be shot in the studio in the following parts.
Warner Bros.
The famous “big room” bringing together the four Houses, but also the classrooms were created in the Warner studios (can be visited around London) and very specific areas like when Harry climbs onto the roof of the school in Goblet of Fire, are filmed entirely in the Shepperton studios in the United Kingdom.
Warner Bros.
If you also want to visit the area around Hogwarts, know that you also have to go to Scotland. Indeed, Loch Shiel is used for the lake scene in The Prisoner of Azkaban, Hagrid’s hut was located in Glen Coe, also in Scotland, and the viaduct leading the students to Hogwarts shown in several films is the viaduct of Glenfinnan – which is also the birthplace of the McLeods in the Highlander universe.
Warner Bros.
The Glenfinnan Viaduct
While a Harry Potter series is in preparation and will offer a brand new adaptation of JK Rowling’s work, and if small appearances by actors from the first saga were to be expected, it would necessarily be in other roles. Some are already for it and others are fundamentally against it.
However, we do not know who will play Harry, Ron, Hermione and their friends because the project is only in the writing phase. Each season will follow a novel, which will give us a total of seven seasons to watch. In joy or in amazement? Only the future will tell us !