Château d'Ussé

Interesting facts

The collegiate chapel in the grounds, consecrated in 1538, shelters a glazed terracotta Virgin attributed to the workshop of Luca della Robbia.

Vauban, Louis XIV's great military engineer, was linked to the family by his daughter's marriage and left his mark on the terraces.

The writer Chateaubriand stayed at Ussé, and he is said to have worked on parts of his Memoirs from Beyond the Grave here.

According to tradition, the cedars of Lebanon in the park were brought back from the Holy Land by Chateaubriand and planted in the early 19th century.

During the Second World War the château served as a safe repository for collections of the French National Library and the Senate library.

The château houses a notable collection of tapestries woven in Brussels and Oudenaarde.

Ussé has belonged to the Blacas family since the late 19th century, and it remains a privately owned home.

Jacques d'Espinay, who bought Ussé from the Bueil family in the 15th century, gave the fortress its first Renaissance transformation.

The château was first protected as a historic monument in 1927, with further protections for the chapel and buildings following in 1931 and 1951.

Why it is worth it

The ridge above the Indre river was first fortified around the year 1000 by Gelduin I, a Viking-descended warlord, in stone and timber built for war rather than comfort. The Espinay family bought it in the 15th century and softened its defenses into Italian Renaissance elegance; in 1639 it passed to Louis Bernin de Valentinay, whose son later commissioned André Le Nôtre — the same landscape architect responsible for the gardens of Versailles — to lay out its terraced grounds.

Charles Perrault, the author who gave the world Cinderella and Puss in Boots, was a repeat guest here, and tradition holds that Ussé's turrets, forest and river setting are what he had in mind writing La Belle au Bois Dormant — Sleeping Beauty — in 1697. The château has since leaned fully into the connection: climbing through its towers today, visitors pass wax-figure tableaux acting out scenes from the fairy tale, room by room, up to the princess's bedchamber.

Its silhouette had already made it something of a celebrity by the 1920s, when a French railway company put Ussé on a national tourism poster; that image, circulating for decades afterward, is widely cited as one of the Loire châteaux that fed into the visual idea of a Disney-style fairy-tale castle, long before any studio confirmed it directly.

Getting there

28 km from Saumur. Tours Val de Loire Airport (TUF) is about 39 km away.

From the encyclopaedia

Ussé is a castle in the Indre-et-Loire département, in France. The stronghold at the edge of the Chinon forest overlooking the Indre Valley was first fortified in the eleventh century by the Norman seigneur of Ussé, Gueldin de Saumur, who surrounded the fort with a palisade on a high terrace. The site was passed to the Comte de Blois, who rebuilt it in stone.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

Château d'Ussé

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

Plan your visit

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From the encyclopaedia