A castle is a residence reserved for a person of high nobility, unlike a mansion or a strong house, reserved for the little nobility.
Three types of castles can be distinguished according to their openings and gardens:

Fort castles are purely defensive. As such, they are equipped with small single-flying windows and do not have a pleasant garden. So living in a strong castle must have been sad to die...

The Renaissance castles appeared with the end of the Hundred Years War. It was no longer necessary to wage war. So we let the light in by adopting window-to-wall windows. In addition, leisure gardens have been set up, such as the garden of Diane de Poitiers and Catherine de Médicis in Chenonceau.

Classical castles were born with the mastery by carpenters of large wooden windows during the reigns of Henry IV and Louis XIII. The architecture of the Place des Vosges in Paris marks the advent of the city. Moreover, these castles are often created ex nihilo with long symmetrical facades, in large properties decorated with French gardens and water bodies. The archetype is of course the Château de Versailles.


You will find here more than 5,000 castles classified by region, department, and 3 sub-categories above.
NB: For regions that have not been grouped, namely Bretagne, Centre-Val-de-Loire, Corse, Île-de-France, Pays-de-la-Loire and Provence-Alpes-Côte-d'Azur, you must not navigate through the navigation opposite, but by the "classic" route below to discover the subcategories of your department.