The Château de Cordès is a castle

Castle

A castle is a type of fortified structure built in Europe and the Middle East during the Middle Ages by European nobility. Scholars debate the scope of the word castle, but usually consider it to be the private fortified residence of a lord or noble...

 situated at an altitude of 900m in the commune

Communes of France

The commune is the lowest level of administrative division in the French Republic. French communes are roughly equivalent to incorporated municipalities or villages in the United States or Gemeinden in Germany...

of Orcival

Orcival

Orcival is a commune in the Puy-de-Dôme department in Auvergne in central France.-References:*...

, in the Puy-de-Dôme

Puy-de-Dôme

Puy-de-Dôme is a department in the centre of France named after the famous dormant volcano, the Puy-de-Dôme.Inhabitants were called Puydedomois until December 2005...

 département of France. The château is privately owned, and open to the public. It is classified as a historic monument and the garden is listed by the French Ministry of Culture as one of the Remarkable Gardens of France.

History

The original castle dates from 1268, when it belonged to Guillaume de Chalus, whose family occupied the castle for nearly four hundred years. In 1659, they sold it to Emmanuel d'Allègre. His son, Yves de Tourzel, the marquis d'Allegre, who became a marechal of France in 1724, rebuilt it and transformed it into a residence, and in 1695, commissioned the workshop of Le Nôtre

André Le Nôtre

André Le Nôtre was a French landscape architect and the principal gardener of King Louis XIV of France...

 to lay out the garden.

In 1965, the new owner restored the château and recreated the gardens.

Writer Paul Bourget

Paul Bourget

Paul Charles Joseph Bourget , was a French novelist and critic.-Biography:He was born in Amiens in the Somme département of Picardie, France. His father, a professor of mathematics, was later appointed to a post in the college at Clermont-Ferrand, where Bourget received his early education...

 set the action of his novel, Le démon de midi, at the Château de Cordès.

The château has been listed since 1933 as a monument historique

Monument historique

A monument historique is a National Heritage Site of France. It also refers to a state procedure in France by which national heritage protection is extended to a building or a specific part of a building, a collection of buildings, or gardens, bridges, and other structures, because of their...

by the French Ministry of Culture.

The château

The exterior facade on the Sioulet River side is decorated with machicolation

Machicolation

A machicolation is a floor opening between the supporting corbels of a battlement, through which stones, or other objects, could be dropped on attackers at the base of a defensive wall. The design was developed in the Middle Ages when the Norman crusaders returned. A machicolated battlement...

. The interior of the castle contains a Carrara

Carrara

Carrara is a city and comune in the province of Massa-Carrara , notable for the white or blue-grey marble quarried there. It is on the Carrione River, some west-northwest of Florence....

 marble

Marble

Marble is a metamorphic rock composed of recrystallized carbonate minerals, most commonly calcite or dolomite.Geologists use the term "marble" to refer to metamorphosed limestone; however stonemasons use the term more broadly to encompass unmetamorphosed limestone.Marble is commonly used for...

 altarpiece

Altarpiece

An altarpiece is a picture or relief representing a religious subject and suspended in a frame behind the altar of a church. The altarpiece is often made up of two or more separate panels created using a technique known as panel painting. It is then called a diptych, triptych or polyptych for two,...

 dating from the 16th century and the sculptured tomb of Yves II. The living room is decorated with plaster work dating from the 18th century.

The gardens

The castle is approached through an alley of hornbeam

Hornbeam

Hornbeams are relatively small hardwood trees in the genus Carpinus . Though some botanists grouped them with the hazels and hop-hornbeams in a segregate family, Corylaceae, modern botanists place the hornbeams in the birch subfamily Coryloideae...

 trees five meters high, with two formal gardens with basins, surrounded by hedges. Next to the castle is a labyrinth with a rose garden in the centre. Diirectly in front of the castle is a topiary

Topiary

Topiary is the horticultural practice of training live perennial plants, by clipping the foliage and twigs of trees, shrubs and subshrubs to develop and maintain clearly defined shapes, perhaps geometric or fanciful; and the term also refers to plants which have been shaped in this way. It can be...

garden.

External links

• Official site of the Chateau de Cordes
• Ministry of Culture listing for Château de Cordès
• Ministry of Culture photos
• Page from the list of Remarkable Gardens of France of the French Ministry of Culture