There are many wonderful reasons to visit the Loire valley. It’s close enough to Paris that you can make a day trip of a visit there. For us wine enthusiasts, there’s Vouvray, Chinon, Sancerre and Muscadet to occupy our tasting hours. Those wines go well with the Touraine cuisine (named after the central town of Tours). And there’s the history, so much of it, best exemplified by the castles that line the river Loire and other streams nearby.
Photo courtesy of YouTube.
In the 15th and 16th centuries, French monarchs and nobles preferred to avoid the hoi polloi of Paris and so built magnificent châteaux from which they could both rule and enjoy themselves. There are many to visit, including Chambord, Blois and Amboise. If you only have the time to visit one, we recommend that it be the Château de Chenonceau.
You enter the grounds down a long allée of plane trees until, seeming suddenly, a fairy castle appears before you. That’s the entrance to the château, where you can and should sign up for a tour, available in many languages including English. A guide will show you around the rooms, point out some interesting information about the gardens and explain the history of Chenonceau.
The château that’s there today wasn’t the original. That one was burned down and replaced by a nobleman in generally the form we see the front of it today in the early 16th century. King Francois I seized it a few decades later. His son, Henri II, set it aside as a love nest for his mistress, Diane de Poitiers. This didn’t much please his wife, Catherine de Medici, so she kicked out Diane and expanded the château to cross the river Cher. [As you tour Chenonceau, you can see two gardens out the windows. One was Diane’s, the other one Catherine’s. The mistress got the better of the gardening competition.]
Because the château spans the river, it was used by Jews and other refugees from German-occupied France during the Second World War. The Cher was the dividing line between the Nazis and Vichy France to the south. Escapees would enter the front of the château and sneak out the back.
Photo courtesy of The Local France.
Perhaps the most unique and certainly the most romantic aspect of a visit to Chenonceau is to rent a little boat and row along the Cher, under the château. There’s no other castle in all of Europe where you can do that!
The architecture of Chenonceau combines Gothic and Renaissance elements, so viewing it is another way you can experience history there. Most of the rooms in the château are decorated so you can give yourself a sense of how royalty treated itself in the early Renaissance. As Mel Brooks put it, it was good to be the king. Now, of course, Chenonceau is a historic monument. Wars and revolutions have not dimmed the elegance and attraction of this great castle. Other than Versailles, it’s the most visited château in France. When you are in the Loire valley for wine tasting, leave yourself some time for castling, too, especially at Chenonceau.