Fort Boyard

Interesting facts

According to a famous story, Vauban told Louis XIV it would be easier to seize the Moon with one's teeth than to build a fort here.

Before any walls could rise, workers piled stone on the Boyard sandbank to make an artificial plateau about 100 by 50 metres.

By the end of 1805 about 26,000 cubic metres of rock had been dumped on the bank, some blocks as large as 10 cubic metres.

One of the supply ships carrying stone for the foundations sank, taking six of its crew with it.

The finished fort is about 68 metres long and 31 metres wide, with walls 20 metres high pierced by 74 gun embrasures.

It was designed to hold a garrison of 250 men, with supplies to last them two months.

Before the Communards, its first prisoners were Prussian soldiers from the war of 1870–71; later inmates included the journalist Henri Rochefort.

In 1962 the fort was auctioned for 28,000 francs to a dentist who also ran a restaurant in the Alpine resort of Avoriaz.

The game-show producer Jacques Antoine bought it in 1988 for 1.5 million francs, then handed it to the Charente-Maritime department for a symbolic franc.

The lookout tower, the fort's highest point, rises 27 metres above the highest tides.

Why it is worth it

Fort Boyard took fifty-six years to build and was obsolete within two. Construction started in 1801 under Napoleon, aimed at closing a gap in French coastal defences between two islands off La Rochelle, but the project stalled in 1809 and sat unfinished for nearly three decades before Louis Philippe I restarted it in 1837 over renewed friction with Britain. When it was finally completed in 1857, artillery range had moved on so far in the intervening decades that the gap the fort was built to cover no longer needed covering — the fort that took two generations to finish was militarily pointless by the time it could fire a shot.

It didn't sit entirely idle, though not for the reason it was built. After 1871 it briefly served as a prison for communards rounded up following the suppression of the Paris Commune, before being abandoned outright in 1913 — a fully built fortress, in working order, simply left to the Atlantic weather for the better part of eight decades.

What saved it from continuing to rot was television. In 1990 a French crew turned the empty fort into the set for the game show that bears its name, and Fort Boyard has since been adapted in more than forty countries — meaning a fortification designed to never actually be used for its stated purpose has, in its second act, been watched by more people worldwide than any fort in French history that actually saw combat.

Getting there

19 km from La Rochelle. La Rochelle Île de Ré Airport (LRH) is about 20 km away.

From the encyclopaedia

Fort Boyard is a fort built on Boyard bank, an ocean bank located between the Île-d'Aix and the Île d'Oléron in the Pertuis d'Antioche straits on the west coast of France. Though a fort on Boyard bank was suggested as early as the 17th century, it was not until the 1800s under Napoleon Bonaparte that work began. Building started in 1801 and was completed in 1857. In 1967, the final scene of the French film Les aventuriers was filmed at the remains of the fort. Since 1990, it is the filming location for the eponymous TV game show.

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Fort Boyard

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

Plan your visit

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From the encyclopaedia