Château de Belcastel

The rocky spur above the north bank of the Aveyron, downstream from Rodez, may be Roman in origin, meant to protect the valley and counter invasions. The first building on it was a pre-Romanesque chapel of the eighth century, dedicated to Saint Mary Magdalene. A castle followed in the ninth and tenth centuries, with one chapel laid over the other, fortifications in the tenth and eleventh, and a reworking in the fourteenth.

The founder is named as Oldoric I «de Panat» of Rouergue, de Bello Castello, who lived from 940 to 987, and the first lord as Gérard I Frotard de Belcastel de Rouergue, born in 966. The Belcastel family was in every quarrel that came, local, regional and national.

In 1368 Marceline de Belcastel sold the castle to the King of England. At the close of the Brétigny accords it passed into the possessions of Charles V of France, held jointly with the abbey of Bonnecombe, and late in the fourteenth century Charles gave it, for services rendered, to the Armagnacs, who handed it on to the Saunhac. The Saunhac put life back into the village below, finishing the alterations to the castle the Armagnacs had begun and building the bridge and the church of Sainte-Marie-Madeleine, both still standing. At the end of the Hundred Years' War they altered the castle to make it pleasanter to live in, cutting mullioned windows and glazing them.

After the Saunhac the castle went by marriage from family to family, first to Jean III de Morlhon, seneschal of Quercy and Rouergue, then to François I de Buisson de Bournazel, governor and seneschal of Rouergue, who never lived there and left the place to itself. Its history broke off at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the castle abandoned and left in ruin.

The Revolution passed it by. In the nineteenth century a villager, Rose Acquier, bought the ruin to work as a stone quarry, paying 750 livres to Marie-Agathe Dorothée de Comminges, widow and heiress of Jean Buisson de Bournazel; her customers took out the good stone and left gaping wounds in the walls. Early in the twentieth century the west front came down with an enormous crash, and the dismantling ran on until 1928, when the French Ministry of Culture entered the ruins on the register of historic monuments on 5 March.

For the forty-six years that followed, vegetation took the walls and the ruin served as a playground for the village children. Fernand Pouillon, who lived from 1912 to 1986, came upon it at the start of the 1970s and bought it in 1972 for 150,000 new francs. The work then ran for eight uninterrupted years. He rebuilt by hand with a dozen Algerian stonemasons, holding his men to medieval technology alone, while ten master glaziers took on the 87 sixteenth-century stained-glass panels he had acquired from the cathedral of Orléans.

The official inauguration was held on 6 July 1984. François Mitterrand raised Pouillon to officer of the Légion d'honneur. He had taken out permits to rebuild every ruined house in the village but finished only one; the commune later bought the others he had consolidated and restored them with European funds, and Belcastel was named one of the Plus Beaux Villages de France in 1992. Pouillon died in the castle on 24 July 1986 and, true to his egalitarian convictions, was buried in the village cemetery in an anonymous grave, over which stands a replica of the castle's tenth-century guard room, the chamber that had been his architect's office through the restoration.

The castle passed to Pouillon's last wife, Catherine Sayen, who opened it to the public, but his heirs could not keep it. In 2005 Sayen sold it to the New York gallerist Heidi Leigh and her husband, Nick Leone, who ran it as historic monument and art gallery at once, filling the interior with medieval artefacts while leaving the fortress architecture undisturbed, then adding a partial conversion to a hotel and a swimming pool sunk in the moat.

The association Héritage Fernand Pouillon was founded on 30 March 2017, and that same year the French Ministry of Culture awarded Leigh a medal and the title of Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres. In 2022 Pouillon's restoration was itself classified as a historic monument, and the castle is one of a group of Aveyron castles joined in the tourist itinerary La Route des Seigneurs du Rouergue. Leigh and Leone separated in 2023 and put it up for sale. In 2025 Éric Girard, former head of Carglass, and his wife Valérie bought it for three million euros, and it remains open to visitors alongside its hotel business.