The Château de Menthon: The Castle Above Lake Annecy

Required Activities

• Walk up to the gate and find the three defences in order: the machicolation over the entrance arch, the 15th-century iron-bound door with its grilled judas and its knocker, and on the high north-east corner the keep they call the tour des armes, 8 m to a side, with the round stair turret that climbs past its roof to serve as a lookout

• On the tour through a house of 105 rooms over four levels, find the 13th-century kitchens, the Gobelins tapestry of 1730 in the great hall, and in the library the complete set of Diderot's Encyclopédie among more than 12,000 books printed before 1800

• From the four windows of the 100 m2 grand salon added in the 18th century, and then from the terrace outside, place the view: the wooded headland of the Roc de Chère nature reserve directly below, the dents de Lanfon on one side and mont Veyrier on the other, with 200 m of rock between you and the lake at an altitude of 600 m

• Find the richly decorated Romanesque chapel inside the walls, and stand in the oldest part of the castle, where tradition puts the birth of Bernard de Menthon, the founder of the hospices on the Grand and Petit-Saint-Bernard passes who gave the village its second name

• Walk down off the spur to the lake at Menthon-Saint-Bernard and out onto the Roc de Chère, the protected headland the castle towers look down on, then turn and find the three square towers from the water's edge