Photo : Fabien.lotte / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Château de Cadillac
The ducal château of Cadillac, at Cadillac-sur-Garonne in the Gironde, overlooks the Garonne and the bastide of Cadillac. It was built from 1598 to 1634 for Jean-Louis de Nogaret de La Valette, first duke of Épernon, favourite of Henry III nicknamed the "half-king". Pierre Biard, Pierre Souffron and Gilles de La Touche Aguesse were its architects. It marks the end of the Renaissance and heralds seventeenth-century classicism.
In the mid-eighteenth century, its wings and corner pavilions were dismantled and their stones sold. After the Revolution, the château became a women's prison in the nineteenth century, then a reformatory for girls, damaged by a fire in 1928 and closed in 1951. It thus bears witness both to the splendours of the seventeenth century and to this period of detention.
Owned by the State and managed by the Centre des monuments nationaux, it presents restored seventeenth-century interiors and tapestries from the Épernon collections, with a garden restored in the late twentieth century.
