Castle Directory
Browse the world’s castles, fortresses, and historic strongholds.
Filter by country, region, type, period, or UNESCO status.
Three Castles of Eguisheim
The Three Castles of Eguisheim are one of the strangest sights in Alsace: three ruined keeps standing shoulder to shoulder on a single wooded ridge above the Wine Route. Known in French as the Trois...
Château du Haut-Barr
High above Saverne, on three great fists of pink sandstone, the Château du Haut-Barr watches half a province at once. The bishops of Strasbourg raised it here in the early 1100s for precisely that reason:...
Château de Fleckenstein
The Château de Fleckenstein does not sit on its ridge so much as grow out of it. On the far northern edge of Alsace, where the Vosges forest runs up against the German border, a...
Château du Hohlandsbourg
The Château du Hohlandsbourg rises on a flat granite summit above Wintzenheim, a short drive west of Colmar in the Haut-Rhin. At 620 meters above sea level it commands one of the widest views in...
Château de Termes
The Château de Termes is a ruined fortress in the Corbières hills of the Aude, and it guards a quiet paradox. Its fame rests on the Cathar heresy and one of the longest sieges of...
Châteaux de Lastours
The Châteaux de Lastours are not one castle but four, strung along a single knife-edge of rock in the Montagne Noire, a short drive north of Carcassonne. Cabaret, Tour Régine, Surdespine and Quertinheux stand almost...
Château de Puilaurens
Château de Puilaurens crowns a rocky spur 697 meters above sea level, high over the Boulzane valley, in the commune of Lapradelle-Puilaurens in the Aude, at the gateway to the Fenouillèdes. For four centuries it...
Château de Montségur
Château de Montségur, the last open stronghold of the Cathar church, fell in 1244 when about 220 Perfects were burned below the pog. The ruin on the summit today is the royal fortress the French...
Château des Baux-de-Provence
The Château des Baux-de-Provence crowns a bare limestone spur in the heart of the Alpilles, its ruined ramparts rising so seamlessly from the rock that fortress and cliff seem cut from a single mass. For...
Fort Saint-André
Fort Saint-André is the royal fortress that France raised on Mount Andaon to stare down the popes of Avignon across the Rhône. From the right bank at Villeneuve-lès-Avignon, its twin towers and seven hundred and...
Château de Tarascon
Château de Tarascon is the river fortress of Good King René, and one of the best-preserved medieval castles in France. The Angevin princes who raised it on the left bank of the Rhône built both...
Palais des Papes
The Palais des Papes is the largest Gothic palace in the world, a fortress and a court fused into one vast block of pale stone above the Rhône. For most of the fourteenth century it...