Fact-checked
The châteaux of Bourgogne-Franche-Comté in the Index — 6 so far, each fact-checked against the historical record. Back to the map.
1605–1625 · Louis XIII château with painted apartments
Behind a sober moated exterior in southern Burgundy hide the most sumptuous Louis XIII interiors in France — gilded, lapis-blue painted apartments of the 1620s that somehow survived every fashion since. The vast open-well staircase was among the most daring of its day.
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1542–1550 · Italian Renaissance palace
The purest Italian Renaissance palace in France — designed by Sebastiano Serlio, theorist of architecture to Francis I, as a perfect square around a courtyard of rhythmic pilasters. Within: one of the largest ensembles of 16th-century murals in France, by artists of the Fontainebleau school.
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12th–17th centuries · Renaissance château of a witty exile
The revenge of a banished wit: Roger de Bussy-Rabutin — cousin and correspondent of Madame de Sévigné, exiled by Louis XIV for his scandalous Histoire amoureuse des Gaules — spent his disgrace covering the walls with portrait galleries and barbed painted mottoes aimed at the court that cast him out.
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11th century onwards; Vauban works 17th c. · Mountain fortress of five enclosures
A fortress stacked on a Jura crag above the cluse de Pontarlier, guarding the road to Switzerland for a thousand years. Vauban modernised it; its cells held Mirabeau — and Toussaint Louverture, hero of the Haitian Revolution, who died a prisoner here in the mountain cold of April 1803.
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Begun 1997 — still rising · 13th-century castle, built today
The castle being built from scratch, right now, with 13th-century tools and techniques: begun in 1997 in a former quarry, Guédelon is the world's largest experimental-archaeology site, where quarriers, masons, carpenters and rope-makers raise a Philip-Augustus-style castle before your eyes. Restorers of real châteaux come here to learn how it was actually done.
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12th–15th centuries · Burgundian ducal-era fortress
The great fortress of the Auxois, glowering over the Burgundy Canal from its hilltop village — one of the 'most beautiful villages of France'. Rebuilt in Flamboyant taste by Philippe Pot, Grand Seneschal of Burgundy, whose famous tomb of hooded mourners now stands in the Louvre.
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