Château d’Ussé stands in white tuffeau stone above the Indre, at the point where the river valley meets the dark edge of the Chinon forest, its towers and dormers stacked in tiers up the hillside. The silhouette is the reason the place is famous. By long tradition it is the château that gave Charles Perrault…
Château de Tarascon is the river fortress of Good King René, remarkably well preserved, a condition the town credits to sustained restoration and maintenance by the state’s monument architects. The Angevin princes who raised it on the left bank of the Rhône built both a stronghold and a residence, a working castle on the frontier…
The island fortress off Marseille that never fired a shot, made the world’s most famous prison by Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo.
Frankenstein Castle near Darmstadt is a real 13th-century knights’ ruin in Hesse, with a documented history quite unlike the Mary Shelley legend.
Heidelberg Castle is one of the most important Renaissance ruins north of the Alps. Built by the Wittelsbach Counts, later Electors, Palatine of the Rhine from the thirteenth century, it was devastated by French forces in 1689 and 1693 and sealed as a ruin by lightning in 1764.