Château d'Amboise

Château d'Amboise sits on a rocky spur above the Loire, and the position explains much of its story. A fortress stood here long before the Renaissance, but the building most visitors come to see took shape from the 1490s, when Charles VIII, born in the castle in 1470, set about turning it into a modern royal residence. He had returned from the Italian campaigns with a taste for new decoration and brought Italian craftsmen with him, so the Flamboyant Gothic of the older wings gives way to early Renaissance ideas in the gardens and ornament. He died here in 1498, reportedly after striking his head on a low doorway.

Anne de Bretagne, queen to Charles VIII and later to Louis XII, also lived here, and François I spent part of his youth at Amboise and returned to it often in the early years of his reign. It was under his patronage that Leonardo da Vinci moved to the neighbouring manor of Clos Lucé in 1516 and died there in 1519. The Chapelle Saint-Hubert, a small Gothic chapel inside the castle grounds, is traditionally held to contain Leonardo's tomb. The remains were moved and mixed after the destruction of the collegiate church where he was first buried, so the attribution is a matter of tradition rather than certainty, but the lintel carvings of the chapel are worth looking at in their own right.

The castle has a darker chapter too. In 1560 the Amboise conspiracy, a failed Huguenot plot to seize the young Francis II, ended in mass executions here, with bodies displayed along the balconies and ramparts. In the nineteenth century the Algerian leader Emir Abd El-Kader was held at the château from 1848 to 1852. The royal family of Orléans later owned it, and it is now managed by a foundation that keeps the rooms open to the public.

Inside, the furnished rooms of the Logis du Roi give an idea of late Gothic and Renaissance interiors. From the lower town you reach the entrance by the sloping walkway that climbs from the Place Michel Debré. The free HistoPad tablet adds reconstructions of how rooms looked in the sixteenth century, which helps because much of the original furniture is gone. Outside, the terraces and gardens look over the town roofs and the river, and the Tour des Minimes and Tour Hurtault hold wide spiral ramps built so that riders could enter the castle on horseback.

Amboise lies in the Loire Valley, whose châteaux and river landscape are listed by UNESCO, and the town is reachable from Tours-Saint-Pierre-des-Corps, the nearest TGV station, about twenty kilometres away. Plan on around ninety minutes to two hours. The castle pairs naturally with Clos Lucé, a short walk along the street, and with the old streets around Rue Nationale and the church of Église Saint-Denis. For a quieter view of the same silhouette, walk the riverbank on the Sentier des Bords de Loire and look back up at the walls. It suits visitors interested in French royal history, families who like towers and ramps, and anyone following the Loire châteaux by train or bike.