Timeline

Key figures

Origin and history

Orion Castle, located in the village of the same name in Béarn (Pyrénées-Atlantiques), is a 17th century building originally designed as a secular abbey. Owned by Casamajor's family until the French Revolution, he was a place of local power and secular religious life. Its architecture and furniture today preserve the traces of this time, as well as portraits and archives of the first owners.

At the beginning of the 19th century, the Larrouy family, enriched by the Bayonne ham trade, acquired the castle and built it. The heir Henriette Larrouy then married Paul Reclus, a doctor whose family made a lasting mark on the history of the place. Their daughter-in-law, Madeleine Reclus, inspired in 1918 a poem to Henri de Régnier, friend of André Gide, celebrating the name of the castle: "I love your house that bears a star name".

The castle becomes an intellectual and family meeting place, welcoming figures like the brothers of Paul Reclus: Elisha Reclus, anarchist geographer, and Armand Reclus, engineer of the Panama Canal. In the 20th century, Jean Labbé, last descendant, married Marguerite Bérard, daughter of the academician and minister Léon Bérard. The property, transmitted until the 2000s, extends over 30 hectares of wood and meadows, facing the Pyrenees.

In 2003, the Premauer family, from Germany, bought the castle and started its restoration. Transformed into guest rooms and a venue for cultural events, it has hosted since seminars, concerts (such as those of Nadège Rochat or the Jacobine choir in Göttinghen) and weeks of reflection with personalities such as Professor Julian Nida-Rümelin. The path of Santiago de Compostela, passing through Orion, adds a heritage and spiritual dimension to the site.

Ranked among the castles of the Pyrénées-Atlantiques, the estate combines historical preservation and openness to the public. Its interiors, furnished and authentically decorated, offer a rare testimony of the aristocratic and bourgeois life in Béarn, from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries. The meetings of Orion, regular cultural events, perpetuate this tradition of exchange and creation.

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