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Origin and history

The Château de la Nine is located on a hill facing the Pyrenees, surrounded by retaining walls and terraces housing buildings, garden and park. Its architecture consists of a body of main house square, covered with a roof in pavilion, with pavilions at the corners of the south-east facade and two wings in return of square housing the communes. Inside, two large Greek cross galleries, vaulted in a cradle and surmounted by a dome at their intersection, distribute four apartments located at the angles. A plan of 1886, drawn up before work commissioned by Henri-Joseph Gaston de Lassus Saint-Geniès, confirms that the interior distribution has remained almost unchanged since 1766.

The exact date of construction of the castle remains uncertain, but its origin is related to the marriage of Charlotte-Renée de Laroche de Fontenilles with Catherine-Emmanuel de Timbrune, Count of Valencia, in 1675. The estate of Boussan, included in the dowry, was considered too old by the Timbrune family of Valencia, who would then have built the Nine. This castle remained in this family until 1818, when Cyrus de Timbrune sold it to Jean-Dominique Laudet, a Mirande merchant. The estate then passed into the hands of several owners, including Julien Laudet, mayor of Boussan and general councillor, then Hugues Georges Thomas, before being acquired in 1886 by Henri-Joseph Gaston de Lassus Saint-Geniès, who undertook work there.

An inventory after the death of 1766 describes precisely the castle, then furnished and regularly inhabited, with its rooms, furnishings and orchards. The monument, partially classified in 2023, illustrates the classical architecture of the cominge nobility between the 17th and 18th centuries, mixing residential function and social prestige. Its isolation and wooded frame make it a rare testimony of the spatial organization of the aristocratic domains of the time in Occitanie.

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