Château d'Ussé

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.

In the fifteenth century, the ruined castle of Ussé was purchased by Jean V de Bueil, a captain-general of Charles VII who became seigneur of Ussé in 1431 and began rebuilding it in the 1440s; his son Antoine de Bueil married Jeanne de Valois in 1462, the biological daughter of Charles VII and Agnès Sorel, who brought as dowry 40,000 golden écus. Antoine was heavily in debt and in 1455, sold the château to Jacques d’Espinay, son of a chamberlain to the Duke of Brittany, who, in turn, was chamberlain to the king. Espinay built the chapel, completed by his son Charles in 1612, in which the Flamboyant Gothic style is mixed with new Renaissance motifs, and began the process of rebuilding the fifteenth-century château that resulted in the sixteenth-seventeenth century aspect of the structure seen today.

In the seventeenth century Louis I de Valentinay, comptroller of the royal household, demolished the north range of buildings in order to open the interior court to the views over the parterre terrace, to a design ascribed to André Le Nôtre. Valentinay's son-in-law was the military engineer Vauban, who visited Ussé on numerous occasions.

Later, the castle was passed to the House of Rohan. In 1802, Ussé was purchased by the duc de Duras; as early as March 1813, low-key meetings were held at Ussé among a group of Bourbon loyalists, who met to sound out the possibilities of a Bourbon Restoration: such men as Trémouille, duc de Fitzjames, the prince de Polignac, Ferrand, Montmorency and the duc de Rochefoucault attended.

Text adapted from “Château d'Ussé” on Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Château d'Ussé ranks #437 of 7,738 worldwide in the atlas's castle fame ranking, and #43 of the 469 mapped in France. Founded 1612, it is older than 31% of the atlas's dated landmarks — one of 580 atlas entries founded in the 17th century. Its Wikipedia articles were opened 9,914 times in the last 60 days, more than 92% of the atlas. 10 more atlas landmarks stand within 25 km. The nearest day-trip guide is Tours, 34 km away. It is one of the 58 landmarks on the atlas's regional map of the Loire Valley. See how France compares in the castle statistics.

View on the interactive castle map →

Read the full history on Wikipedia ↗