Loire Valley | Chateau de Chambord

The Loire Valley - Château de Chambord

The Château de Chambord is the largest of all the Châteaux in the Loire Valley. The château was the brainchild of King Francois I who returned from Italy in the company of Leonardo da Vinci and decided to build a vast château in the Italian Renaissance style in the Loire valley.

The château was built on the site of an old fortified castle in the heart of a forest domain of 5,441 hectares. Its construction took 22 years, from 1525 to 1547. The estate is surrounded by a wall that is 33 km long, making it the biggest enclosed forest park in Europe.

Listed as an ancient monument since 1840, it has also been a UNESCO World Heritage site since 1981, and, since 2005, has been acknowledged as being an establishment of a commercial and financial nature.

The château is located 14km from Blois. For visitors without cars there are two coach services serving the Chambord Estate from the railway station.

The Château de Chambord is a masterpiece of the Renaissance period with its 800 sculpted capitals, 77 staircases, 426 rooms, 282 fireplaces and 156 metres of façade, although its layout is that of a typical fortified castle with a keep, corner towers, and a moat for defense. The rooms are grouped together into self-contained suites, breaking with the medieval tradition of corridor rooms. The château comprises a central keep with four bastion towers at the corners, and the keep is part of the front wall of a larger compound which has a further two large towers.

The Chambord roofscape is asymmetrical and highly original with eleven kinds of towers and three styles of chimney. One of the more striking architectural features is the double-helix open staircase that serves as the centerpiece of the château. The two helixes rise up the three floors of Chambord without ever meeting, they are illuminated from above by what is often described as a lighthouse at the highest point. Some people have suggested that Leonardo da Vinci may have designed the staircase, but this has never been confirmed. Certainly given the importance of the double-helix there is clearly an idea for a novel linking together Leonardo da Vinci, Francois I, the Holy Grail and the DNA of Christ !



Although the name of the architect for the Chateau de Chambord is not actually known, what is known is that on 6 September 1519 François Pombriant was ordered to begin construction. It is also clear that Leonardo da Vinci’s had some influence in its design. Leonardo da Vinci was working as an architect at the court of Francois I at the time, but died before work on the château was started.

220,000 tons of white stones were used in the construction of the château. But the location was surrounded by swamps and many workers died from fever while working on the site.

Although Chambord was never intended to be a fortified castle, it was built around a square central body known as the “donjon”, in keeping with the way fortified castles were built in the old times. In the donjon, which has four towers at the four cardinal points, there are 8 square apartments, the 4 corridors of which lead to the central double helix staircase.

Despite being its instigator, Francois I didn’t actually spend a lot of time in Chambord. He went there for hunting parties on a number of occasions, but spent only seven weeks there in his lifetime, the real purpose of the château was to impress his rival Charles Quint. The Kings of France that succeeded Francois I neglected Chambord for more than 80 years and it fell into decay.

In 1639 Louis XIII gave it to his brother Gaston d'Orleans who carried out much restoration work. Louis XIV transformed it but only lived in it for a very short time and also abandoned it in 1685. Molière had performed the first representation of "Le Bourgeois gentilhomme" there in 1670.

In 1745 Louis XV gave it to Maurice de Saxe who installed his military regiment there, after he died in 1750 it was again abandoned.

In 1792, after the French revolution, the revolutionary government sold the furnishings, the wall panellings were removed and floors were taken up and sold, and the panelled doors were burned to heat the rooms during the sales. The château was again abandoned until Napoleon Bonaparte gave it to his subordinate, Louis Alexandre Berthier.

After his death the château was purchased from his widow for the infant Duke of Bordeaux, Henri Charles Dieudonné (1820–1883) who took the title Comte de Chambord.

King Charles X (1824 to 1830), carried out a small scale restoration and lived in it briefly. In 1870, it served as a field hospital during the Franco-Prussian war.

The final attempt to use the Chateau de Chambord was by the Comte de Chambord but after he died in 1883, the château was left to his sister's descendants, the Ducal family of Parma, Italy. All attempts at restoration ended with the start of World War I in 1914.

The Château was confiscated from the Italian Ducal family by the French state in 1915who sued to recover it, the suit was finally settled in 1932. In 1932 also, the French state purchased the estate from the Prince Elie de Bourdon, Duc de Parme.

During the Second World War, some of the works of art from the Louvre Museum, were stored there.

Restoration work was not begun on the chateau until a few years after the end of World War II. Chambord is now a major tourist attraction.

François Mitterand and Helmut Kohl stayed there during the talks on the European position on armament.

Prince Charles and Lady Diana visited the château on an official visit to France in November 1988.
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Other Chateaux in the Loire Valley -
Chateau de Cheverny
Chateau de Chenonceau