Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur

Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur

Château du Villard

Built in the late 15th century for the wedding of Delphine de Vachères and Pierre de Mathieu, viguier, or royal magistrate, of Forcalquier, Le Villard is a small four-towered château in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, sold only twice in five centuries. Turned into a farm after the Revolution and…

Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur

Château de Thézan

Gallo-Roman villa, medieval fortress, Renaissance château, classical residence, then bathhouse: in Saint-Didier, at the foot of the Ventoux, Thézan layers more than a thousand years of history. After more than thirty years of neglect, this vast Renaissance complex has been undergoing a revival…

Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur

Château du Grand-Pré

A remedy sold as far as China and America paid for Grand-Pré's decoration. The d'Ailhaud de Castelet family, doctors raised to the nobility, commissioned some of the finest carved plasterwork in Provence here in the 18th century. Built under Louis XIV facing Mont Sainte-Victoire, the Luberon…

Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur

Château d'Ansouis

A 12th-century fortress wrapped inside a 1630 pleasure château: Ansouis is two châteaux in one, both built from the stone of the same rock in the southern Luberon, in Provence. Its tiled salons with sculpted plaster, its 18th-century hermitage and its medieval kitchen tell how the nobility of…

Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur

Château de Sauvan

Dressed-stone facades, a balustrade lined with urns, a 47-meter gallery: Sauvan looks like a Paris mansion set down in upper Provence, an almost unique case among the region's châteaux. The Forbin-Janson family built it in 1719, facing the hilltop village of Mane, between the Montagne de Lure and…