Château de Gordes / Gordes Castle - Gordes (Vaucluse, PACA, France) - Castles on Waymarking.com

Gothic-Renaissance Château de Gordes (Gordes Castle), located in the heart of the Gordes on a rocky hill 300 m above sea level, is one of the key landmarks of this picturesque village...

For a thousand years Château de Gordes rules the village of Gordes, built by Guillaume d'Agoult in 1031. The medieval castle, built on a spur at the top of the village, was rebuilt between 1525 and 1541 in the Renaissance style by Bertrand Rambaud de Simiane. Since then, it has a double "Janus" face: a northern facade has still Romanesque-Gothic castle-fort appearance, but the southern facade (and interior) is pure Renaissance-style chateau. During the 17th and 18th centuries, the castle does not seem to have undergone any significant modification, its distant owners being content to collect the revenues of the seigneury. The Revolutionaries seized the castle, but did not destroy it, around 1789. The castle was listed as a French historic monument on July 4, 1931.

From the early 1970s, the reputation of Gordes was strongly associated with the work of famous artist Victor Vasarely who in the late 1960s had bought the castle (...then in ruins) for symbolic one franc and reconstructed it. Castle is open for public today, inside you can find exhibition on the history of Gordes, and also exhibition on artists who have lived in Gordes such as Marc Chagall, André Lhote or Jean Deyrolle.

Source: excerpted and translated from Wikipedia