The Witcher built a massive Aretuza set for season 3

We’re coming up on season 3 of The Witcher, Netflix’s hit fantasy show, and it’s time to get hyped. Season 3 is going to be pivotal for the show. It will be the final time that Henry Cavill plays title character Geralt of Rivia before Liam Hemsworth takes over in season 4. It also covers the events of Time of Contempt, one of the better novels in Andrzej Sapkowski’s Witcher saga and a big turning point for the series at large.

Part of what makes Time of Contempt such a big deal for the series is that it includes a massive summit of sorcerers, sorceresses, rulers and spies on the Isle of Thanedd. That’s the island where the human magic users of the continent have build their stronghold of Aretuza. It’s a big set piece and it’ll be fascinating to see how the show handles it.

Collider had the opportunity to visit the Aretuza set back when season 3 was being filmed, and it sounds pretty impressive. The set features multiple streets and stores, multi-story load-bearing buildings, and props everywhere. It took 300 workers around five months to build the location. There was also a large ballroom set built, which we can see in the latest trailer.

“Even from a feature film perspective, it’s a massive set,” said executive producer Steve Gaub. “It’s an engineering feat, for one, because you don’t build a lot of sets that big in television, you guys probably looked up and I don’t know if there were actually people up there, but the second floor is a fully load-bearing second floor. We can even have a crane up there and do crane shots from the second floor down. We’ve got big scenes with multiple cast up there.”

What scenes are we talking about? Beware potential SPOILERS ahead.

Aretuza will be destroyed in The Witcher season 3

The events we’re expecting to see at Aretuza will reverberate throughout the Continent. Gaub hinted at some of the major events set to go down there, saying that the production had to make sure to film any scenes it needed in the full set before raining down so much “destruction” on Aretuza that sections became “irreparable.”

"So, the challenge first started off as just like a construction logistics challenge. Then it plays so much through our season, then it’s a matter of structuring out what we play and when, and there are some things that are going to happen in Aretuza that are irreparable as far as the destruction that happens. So, making sure we shoot everything before that destruction happens, that we could possibly ever need before we essentially destroy our set. Then there’s a post-destruction condition. So, yeah, it’s been challenging throughout, and then there’s just the grandiosity of it."

It’s a little surprising that he’s talking about Aretuza’s destruction this casually in an interview two weeks ahead of the season release. In any case, this sort of set destruction isn’t unprecedented; Game of Thrones did something similar with its King’s Landing set in its final season, and The Wheel of Time did it with the Two Rivers set for its series premiere. The scale and scope of the events at Aretuza should be on a level with other huge fantasy set pieces.

We’ll see how it all plays out when The Witcher season 3 premieres on Netflix on June 29. The back half of the season will follow on July 27.

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