All day trip guided tour of the Loire Valley Castles with transportation from Paris

Overview

A thirteen-hour day from Paris through the Loire valley with a licensed guide and three châteaux: Chambord with priority entry and access to the double staircase and roof terrace, Chenonceau, and Cheverny with its interiors and kennels.

What to expect

• Collection in central Paris where your option includes it, then the road south.
• Around two and a half hours out, with commentary through the landscape.
• Chambord: priority entry, the double-revolution stair, the terrace among the chimneys.
• Chenonceau: an hour with the guide, then free time in the gardens along the water.
• Cheverny: the interiors, the six themed gardens, and the working kennels.
• The drive back to Paris in the evening.

These are the first houses built to be looked at

A castle is a machine for surviving a siege: thick walls, small openings, height. By the late fifteenth century gunpowder artillery had made all of that obsolete. A tall stone wall was no longer protection — it was a target that could be knocked down from a distance.

What follows in the Loire is the first generation of great houses built after that realisation. The defensive vocabulary is still there — towers, moats, drawbridges — but it is quotation rather than engineering. The walls are thin, the windows are enormous, and the towers are hollow ornament. Nobody was planning to hold these buildings against anyone.

Chambord is a hunting lodge with four hundred rooms

Begun in 1519 for François I, Chambord was never a permanent residence. It was somewhere to bring a court for a few weeks of hunting, and it was left empty for most of its early life.

The roof is the point. Instead of a defensive parapet there is an invented skyline of chimneys, dormers and turrets, and a terrace among them where the court stood to watch the hunt move through the forest below. It is architecture as a viewing platform.

Inside is the double staircase: two spiral flights winding around one open core, so that two people can climb and descend without ever meeting, catching glimpses of each other through the openings. Leonardo da Vinci had come to France as the king's guest and died a few months before the building started; whether the stair is his is argued about, and the argument is part of the fun.

Chenonceau stands on a bridge

The second château is built out across the river Cher, on arches, with a long gallery running over the water. Its history is unusually a history of women — the wife who supervised the building work, the mistress who laid out the gardens, and the queen who took the place from her after the king died and added the gallery.

That bridge did something else in the twentieth century. During the second war the river marked the boundary between occupied France and the zone beyond it, and the gallery had a door at either end.

Cheverny has never been sold

The third has stayed with one family for six centuries, which is why the interiors survive as a lived-in house rather than a museum reconstruction. The kennels hold a working pack of hounds, and the six gardens are laid out by theme.

If the building looks oddly familiar, it was the model an illustrator used for a stately home in a well-known comic series.

Practicalities

Lunch is not included, and with three properties in a day the eating is fitted around the visits.

The châteaux are spread across the valley, so a good part of the day is spent on the coach between them. Chambord alone involves a lot of walking, and the stair and terrace are climbed on foot.

The hounds at Cheverny are working animals on their own schedule; seeing them fed is not something we can promise on any given day.