Château de Gudanes

The Château de Gudanes is an 18th-century neoclassical château in the commune of Château-Verdun, in the southern French department of Ariège. It is built on the site of an older castle destroyed in 1580. The château has been a designated monument historique since 1994, but fell into ruin in the late 20th century. It was purchased in 2013 and is currently being restored.

The commune of Château-Verdun takes its name from a medieval fort that once stood on the site. The first documented existence of a structure was in 1213 when it was counted among the fortifications in the County of Foix by Raymond-Roger, Count of Foix in his report to the Counts of Toulouse. At the beginning of the 14th century, Pierre Arnaud de Château-Verdun was recorded as Seneschal of the County of Foix.

Château Verdun came into the possession of the de Sales (or de Salles) de Lordat family, which came to prominence in the 10th century and amassed considerable wealth and power in Toulouse.

In the 1560s, during the French Wars of Religion, the barony of Gudanes (alternatively spelled Gudannes, Gudanne, Gudaigne and Guadagne) belonged to Fantillon de Sales, a prominent Huguenot. In 1567, the Huguenots of Pamiers fled to the village of Cabannes, where they were massacred by Catholic troops from Castelnau-Durban on 25 May 1567. On 27 September 1568, Fantillon de Sales led a retaliatory attack, slaughtering many Catholics in Tarascon. In 1580, the largely Catholic population of Gudanes launched an uprising against de Sales, plundering and ransacking the Château. Fantillon de Sales was forced to flee but was eventually massacred.

Fantillon's brother Jean-Paul de Sales, a Catholic, inherited the barony. The de Sales received a considerable expanse of land, consisting chiefly of immense forests covering the Pyrenees, in the barony of Gudanes, and were rewarded with a Marquisate de Gudanes. Records from 1671 describe the castle on the site as ruins.

The final Marquis de Gudanes, Louis-Gaspard de Sales, also baron de Château-Verdun, d'Aston, and de Luzenac, was a commandant for the king for the province of Foix. Through his marriage to Marie de Lordat en 1730, he expanded his lands considerably. He was so wealthy he was known as Le Roi des Pyrénées ("The King of the Pyrenees").

Text adapted from “Château de Gudanes” on Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Château de Gudanes ranks #6,736 of 8,764 worldwide in the atlas's castle fame ranking, and #584 of the 675 mapped in France. Founded 1213, it is older than 76% of the atlas's dated landmarks — one of 906 atlas entries founded in the 13th century. 5 more atlas landmarks stand within 25 km. The nearest day-trip guide is Perpignan, 100 km away. It is one of the 22 landmarks on the atlas's regional map of Cathar Country. See how France compares in the castle statistics.

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Read the full history on Wikipedia ↗