Chambord: Francis I's Hunting Lodge and the Double Staircase

Required Activities

• Send half your party up one flight of the double staircase and half up the other, and watch each other through the openings the whole way without ever meeting; at every level notice that the stair opens into four vestibules laid out as a cross, one for each quarter of the keep, and keep going until it puts you out on the terrace

• On the roof terraces, find the 34 m lantern tower over the staircase that stands higher than every chimney at Chambord, with a fleur-de-lys on top; then hunt for a crowned F carved back to front — some were cut in mirror image at terrace level so that God, looking down, would read the king's power the right way round

• Look at Chambord from the south and sort the medieval from the Renaissance in one building: the low enclosing wall and the four fat corner towers on the old castle model, against the Greek-cross plan of the four state rooms on every floor and the terrace above them

• Cycle out into the estate — 50 km2 inside a wall 32 km long, the largest enclosed forest park in Europe — and get far enough from the château to see red deer or wild boar from one of the observation platforms; on the way back, walk the six and a half hectares of formal gardens north and east of the building, put back in 2017 after two centuries gone

• No contemporary document names Chambord's architect. Find the two things in the building that also appear in Leonardo's surviving drawings — the double-helix stair and the Greek-cross arrangement of four rooms round it — and see whether the building convinces you