Château de la Mothe-Chandeniers

Few ruins look as unreal as this one. In the countryside of the northern Vienne, a pale château of turrets, pinnacles and tall windows rises straight from a sheet of green water, its walls stripped to the stone and its roofs open to the sky, while trees and ivy grow out of the rooms where a library and tapestries once hung. From across the moat it reads like a stage set for a fairy tale, which is close to what it was meant to be.

The site is old: a fortified motte stood here in the 13th century, held by the Bauçay family, lords around Loudun. What survives, however, is a nineteenth-century dream. After Baron Joseph Lejeune bought the estate in 1857, he had it rebuilt by the young Parisian architect Adolphe Gaumont in a romantic neo-Gothic manner that borrowed openly from the great Loire châteaux, Blois and above all Azay-le-Rideau, whose trick of setting the whole building in water was repeated here. On 13 March 1932 a fire, blamed on the installation of central heating, gutted the main building and consumed its furnishings; only the chapel, the outbuildings and the dovecote came through. For more than eighty years the shell was left to weather and to the vegetation that gives it its present look.

Its second life began in 2017, when an online campaign run by the platforms Dartagnans and Adopte un château raised more than 1.6 million euros from contributors in over a hundred countries to buy the ruin and save it from collapse. The château is now owned collectively by more than twenty-five thousand shareholders, and the first works concentrated on making the structure safe, consolidating the courtyard, the clock tower and the great staircase, rather than rebuilding. The aim is to keep it as a stabilised ruin, so the drama of stone, water and trees is part of what is being preserved.

Getting there

The château stands in the commune of Les Trois-Moutiers in the Vienne department, about 20 km south of Saumur. The nearest airport is Poitiers-Biard (PIS), around 60 km away. The site lies in open countryside, and the practical way to reach it is by car.