Château de Chambord

Interesting facts

The château counts 282 fireplaces and 84 staircases, and its roofline bristles with eleven kinds of towers and three types of chimneys.

The famous double-helix staircase at the heart of the keep has 274 steps.

Its main façade runs 128 metres and carries more than 800 sculpted columns, while the building rises 56 metres at its highest point.

By September 1526 some 1,800 workers were employed on the building site, and construction dragged on until 1547.

By the time Francis I died, the château had cost 444,070 livres, an enormous sum for a residence he rarely used.

Molière's comedy Le Bourgeois gentilhomme had its first performance here, staged for Louis XIV and his court in 1670.

Stanisław Leszczyński, the deposed king of Poland and father-in-law of Louis XV, lived at Chambord from 1725 to 1733.

In 1939 the Louvre evacuated much of its collection to Chambord, including the Mona Lisa, to keep it safe from the coming war.

On 22 June 1944 an American B-24 Liberator bomber crashed in the château grounds.

Since 1930 the state-owned estate has covered about 5,440 hectares of forest, heath and parkland.

Why it is worth it

Francis I commissioned this in 1519, at 25 years old, ostensibly as a hunting lodge — and then let it grow into a 440-room palace ringed by a wall roughly 32 kilometres long, enclosing what remains Europe's largest walled forest. Deer, wild boar, roe deer and Corsican mouflon still roam inside that boundary today, essentially free, exactly as they were meant to five centuries ago.

Leonardo da Vinci was living nearby at Clos Lucé, in Francis's service, until his death in 1519 — the very year construction began — and while there's no record he ever set foot at Chambord itself, his notebooks (the Codex Atlanticus) contain sketches of central-plan buildings, helical towers and paired spiral staircases that line up closely with what was actually built. The result, a double-helix staircase winding up through the château's central keep, lets two people climb and descend the same shaft at once without ever meeting — an engineering party trick historians treat as close to certain evidence of his influence, even secondhand.

For all that effort, Francis barely used the place: by most accounts he stayed at Chambord for only a few weeks in total across his whole reign, almost always during hunting season. He made up for the absence by branding it relentlessly — more than 300 carved salamanders, his personal emblem, crowned with the motto Nutrisco et extinguo: "I feed on the good fire and extinguish the bad."

Getting there

14 km from Blois. Tours Val de Loire Airport (TUF) is about 63 km away.

From the encyclopaedia

The Château de Chambord in Chambord, Centre-Val de Loire, France, is one of the most recognisable châteaux in the world because of its very distinctive French Renaissance architecture, which blends traditional French medieval forms with classical Renaissance structures. The building was commissioned by Francis I of France and built between 1519 and 1547.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0