Photo : Annick Bregain / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Parc du château de Bonnefontaine
The park of the château de Bonnefontaine, classified a remarkable garden, is 25 km from Fougères and 18 km from Mont-Saint-Michel, on the banks of the Couesnon, in the Ille-et-Vilaine département on the border of Brittany and Normandy. Bonnefontaine is a fortress built by the Chancellor of Duchess Anne of Brittany in the late fifteenth century, then modified over the centuries.
Laid out in the nineteenth century in the medieval taste by a descendant of one of the knights defending Mont-Saint-Michel, the Vicomte de Guiton. The château is dedicated to the Archangel, whose granite statue still watches from the top of the North tower. The château de Bonnefontaine, a listed historic monument, is a member of the Vieilles Maisons Françaises, La Demeure Historique, as well as Parcs et Jardins de Bretagne.
Only the landscape park, classified a remarkable garden, of this fine medieval enclosure is open to visit. Designed and made by the famous landscape designers Denis Bühler and Édouard André, the 25 hectares of groves, meadows and ponds offer visitors peaceful reliefs and horizons in the taste of nineteenth-century English-style parks.
You will stroll through vast natural spaces, pierced by wide perspectives framed by plantings or groves. Giant sequoias, magnolias, cedars, cypresses, palms, copper beeches and chestnuts clothe in silence and majesty this green site of romantic charm.
