Château de Montsoreau

The Château de Montsoreau is a castle in France.

It is made of pale stone. It stands right next to a wide river called the Loire. Here, another river, the Vienne, flows into the Loire.

The Château de Montsoreau stands in the small town of Montsoreau, in western France, between the cities of Angers and Tours. It looks out over the Loire River, at the spot where another river, the Vienne, flows into it.

The castle was built in the 1450s. It is one of many castles, or châteaux, along this part of the Loire. Together with the river's towns and villages, they are part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site called the Loire Valley. Today the castle is a museum of modern art that visitors can explore.

The château stands in the commune of Montsoreau, in the Maine-et-Loire department, overlooking the confluence of the Vienne and the Loire. Its owners stress its unusual site: built on a rocky outcrop at the river's edge, so that its ground floor and cellars on the Loire side could watch river traffic.

It lies within the Loire Valley between Sully-sur-Loire and Chalonnes, inscribed by UNESCO in 2000 as a cultural landscape of historic towns, villages and castles shaped by the river. France protected the castle as a historic monument in 1862; the remains of its chapel and an old courthouse building inside the former walls were added in 1930 and 1938. Since 2016 it has housed a museum of contemporary art.

Look at the two square towers at the ends.

On the roof are tall pointed windows. Inside is a big hall with two huge fireplaces. From the top, you can see two rivers meet.

In the photo, two square towers frame the long main building. Rows of tall windows with pointed tops, called dormers, rise from its steep roof.

Inside, a grand staircase leads up to rooms on the ground and first floors. The great hall is 17 meters long, lit by five windows and warmed by two giant fireplaces. A spiral staircase in a tower on the courtyard side ends in a stone ceiling carved like palm leaves. At the top are terraces 35 meters high, with a view over the place where the Vienne joins the Loire.

The river front shows the main building between its two square towers, with dormers in the steep roof above. The owners describe a main staircase serving the ground- and first-floor apartments and a ceremonial hall 17 m long, lit by five windows and heated by two monumental fireplaces.

The courtyard staircase, in a polygonal tower topped by a terrace, is decorated with pilasters around the windows, antique-style medallions, putti (carved child figures) and candelabra on lion's feet, in an Italian-inspired style; inside, the spiral stair ends in a palm vault. The terraces, 35 m high, are what remains of the old wall walk, which collapsed in the 19th century, and look over the confluence of the Vienne and the Loire.

Today, the castle is a museum.

Inside, visitors see modern art that is all about ideas.

In April 2016 the castle opened as the Château de Montsoreau-Museum of Contemporary Art. It came about through a partnership between an art collector, Philippe Méaille, and the Maine-et-Loire department, which owns the castle.

The museum shows works by Art & Language, a group of artists who began in the 1960s. They were pioneers of conceptual art, art that is more about ideas than about objects. The museum says it has the world's largest collection of their work.

The museum opened to the public in April 2016, the result of a collaboration between the collector Philippe Méaille and the Maine-et-Loire department. It shows Art & Language, a conceptual art movement whose name goes back to the journal Art-Language, founded in 1968; the museum says it holds the world's largest collection of the group's work, and notes that Art & Language was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1986.

The château also has a long link with artists and writers. The owners point to a watercolor by J. M. W. Turner of the confluence, painted on his Loire journey in 1832, and a drawing of the castle's north front by Auguste Rodin from around 1897, showing it whole as it looked in the Renaissance rather than in ruins.