An early postcard of the château, with figures and a bicycle on the drive

Monument Historique Classé · Château-Verdun

Eight Centuries at Gudanes

1213 1741 2013

L’histoire The history

A fort on the site by 1213, ransacked in the Wars of Religion and a ruin by 1671; a new château built from 1741 for the man they called le Roi des Pyrénées; the Revolution, the ironmasters and the long decline; and, since 2013, its return. This is the story of the place you stay in.

1213The fort is first recorded, among the fortifications of the County of Foix
1741The château is begun, to designs by Ange-Jacques Gabriel
2013The Waters family buys it, and the restoration begins

I · 1213 – 1671

Le fort The fort

A Fort Above the Valley

The commune of Château-Verdun takes its name from a medieval fort on this site. It is first recorded in 1213, when Raymond-Roger, Count of Foix, counted it among the fortifications of his county in a report to the Counts of Toulouse, and early in the fourteenth century Pierre Arnaud de Château-Verdun was seneschal of the County of Foix. The fort later passed to the de Sales, a branch of the de Lordat family, long powerful in Toulouse.

In the Wars of Religion the barony of Gudanes belonged to Fantillon de Sales, a prominent Huguenot. In 1567 Huguenots fleeing Pamiers were massacred at Les Cabannes, just below the château, and the next year Fantillon led a reprisal on Tarascon. In 1580 the Catholic people of Gudanes rose against him and ransacked the castle; Fantillon fled, and was later killed. His Catholic brother, Jean-Paul, inherited the barony, and the family were made Marquis de Gudanes, with vast forests across the Pyrénées. By 1671 the old castle was recorded as a ruin.

The château in its valley below the mountain, on an early postcard — The valley the fort once guarded, on an early postcard

1617 – 1730

La baronnie The barony

From the Tabe to Andorra

In the seventeenth century the château stood at the heart of one of the great estates of the county of Foix. By the 1650s the barony of Gudanes covered close to twenty thousand hectares, from the Tabe massif to the border with Andorra: the valley of the Ariège between Bouan and Albiès, and the whole basin of the Aston with its high mountains.

Ten villages belonged to it: Château-Verdun, Les Cabannes, Albiès, Pech, Aston, Larcat, Sinsat, Bouan, Aulos and Verdun. In 1617 they counted 786 households, some three thousand people. The lord of Gudanes owned the mountains and the forests outright, with the corn mills and the iron forges; the villagers had only the right to use them, for building timber, firewood and grazing.

In 1669 the marquis had six forges in the barony, at Sirbal with its saw-mill, Riète, Sigueille, Château-Verdun, Aston, and Esclarans, by then in ruins. That same year a surveyor, sent by Louis de Froidour, the king’s grand master of waters and forests, recorded the barony’s bounds, and drew the château on a sheet of the plan of its woods.

When Louis-Gaspard de Sales married Marie de Lordat in 1730, the Lordadais and the mountains of Luzenac came with her, and the barony grew to almost the size of the canton of Les Cabannes: some thirty-one thousand five hundred hectares, or about seventy-eight thousand acres. The château’s grounds today are ten acres.

The barony of Gudanes, drawn to scale from the old descriptions rather than surveyed: its land in the 1600s, and what Marie de Lordat brought in 1730.

20,000 hain the 1650s, from the Tabe massif to Andorra
31,500 haafter 1730, about 78,000 acres
10villages, with 786 households in 1617
6iron forges in 1669
10 acresthe château’s grounds today

II · 1730 – 1750

Le Roi des Pyrénées The King of the Pyrénées

A Château by Gabriel

The last Marquis, Louis-Gaspard de Sales, baron of Château-Verdun, Aston and Luzenac and the king’s commandant for the province of Foix, grew richer still through his marriage to Marie de Lordat in 1730, and was known as le Roi des Pyrénées. He brought the architect Ange-Jacques Gabriel, who designed the Petit Trianon at Versailles and the Place de la Concorde, to design a new château on the site of the old.

It was built between 1741 and 1750, and the Marquis filled it with company: the writer Laurent Angliviel de la Beaumelle, the mathematician Charles Marie de La Condamine, the naturalist Buffon, Diderot, Montesquieu and Voltaire.

The château's façade above the roses: the pediment, the tall windows and the mansard roof — Gabriel’s façade, above the roses

The Salon de Musique, door after door — The Salon de Musique, where the Marquis received his guests

III · 1789 – 1830

La Révolution The Revolution

Revolution and the Ironmasters

With no son to follow him, Louis-Gaspard left everything to his son-in-law, Louis-Guillaume de Mengaud, Baron de la Hage, a président à mortier of the Parlement de Toulouse, on condition that one of his children take the de Sales name and arms. Then came the Revolution. The Parlement was abolished, de Mengaud was among the first to be arrested, and he died before he could be tried; his property was confiscated all the same. Barely fifty years after it was built, the château had left the de Sales family.

It passed to the Astrié family of Ax, ironmasters of the new bourgeoisie, who were ennobled in 1824 as d’Astrié de Gudanes. In the summer of 1830 the château was pillaged twice, on the 7th and the 10th of August, in the War of the Demoiselles: local men, masked and sometimes dressed as women, rising against the landowners who had taken away their right to the forests.

IV · 1843 – 1922

Les Limairac The de Limairac

Crests Above the Door

From 1843 the château belonged to Charlotte d’Astrié and her husband, the politician Charles Jean de Limairac. Theirs are the crests above the front door today, the silver greyhound of de Limairac and the silver tower of d’Astrié, and the wrought-iron balconies carry Charlotte’s monogram, a C, an A and an L intertwined.

In 1857 the civil court at Foix divided the old barony’s land between the family and the villages, giving the communes a quarter of the high mountains and nine-tenths of the land in the valley.

Renovations are recorded between 1870 and 1875, and Charlotte’s descendants lived at Gudanes into the twentieth century.

The château above its terraced gardens, in an early photograph

V · 1970 – 2013

Le déclin The decline

Very Nearly Lost

In the 1970s and 80s it housed children’s holiday camps. In 1989 an English consortium bought it to make a luxury hotel of seventeen apartments, but in 1994 the château was classified a Historic Monument, planning permission stalled, and in 2009 the consortium gave up and put it on the market. By 2010 the roof was in danger of collapse.

When the Waters family bought it in 2013, several floors had fallen in, the roof was open to the sky in four places and trees were growing inside. The floors lay under rubble, rotten wood, fallen plaster and mushrooms, green mould covered the walls, and the château had never had heating or electricity.

A collapsed floor beneath a tall window, as the château was found — A floor gone, beneath a tall window, as it was found

The mountains seen through the open roof — The mountains, through the roof

“When we build, let us think that we build for ever. Let it not be for present delight, nor for present use alone; let it be such work as our descendants will thank us for.”

John Ruskin, 1849

VI · Since 2013

Le retour The return

What the Walls Kept

Much of the original interior had survived: carved woodwork, stained glass, gilt-framed mirrors and ornamental plaster. As the work has gone on, the château has given up its secrets: a fresco hidden behind wallpaper, two towers of the medieval fort that the family had thought long gone, and, through a hole three metres deep in a floor, a forgotten part of the cellars, perhaps a safe passage in the Second World War.

The restoration goes on, room by room, as a Class I Historic Monument, with six guest rooms open and the workshops.

The restoration Stay the night

The restoration of a fresco, close up — A painted medallion, brought back

Monument Historique · Classé A Class I Historic Monument, restored under French heritage law since 2013