Château de Menthon-Saint-Bernard

The first fortress on the rock went up in the 10th century, about 923: a simple wooden guard post on a promontory above the old Roman road and Lake Annecy, set on a spur 600 metres above sea level and watching the road from Bluffy to Menthon. Bernard of Menthon, founder of the hospice at the Great St Bernard pass, is said to have been born in that first fortress in 1008.

The origin of the Menthon family is uncertain, though they are held to have come from Burgundy, and the lords of Menthon are documented from the end of the 12th century; the family holds the château still. They built the three great square towers soon after they arrived, and from the 13th century acquired a degree of feudal power. The castle itself is first mentioned in 1249, and in 1261 Thomas de Menthon received the investiture of the annual fair, held on the first Sunday after All Saints, from the bishop of Geneva.

The present buildings were raised between the 13th and the 19th centuries. On the highest ground to the north-east, facing the attack, stands the keep called the tour des armes, an irregular quadrangular block some eight metres to a side, flanked by a circular stair turret carried up above it as a lookout; a second tower, nine metres by twelve, commands the entrance to the south-west. The enceinte, pierced with arrow slits, is tied to the keep by curtain walls, and the gate is covered by a machicolation. The whole was heavily remodelled in the 14th and 15th centuries, but masonry of the 13th century survives, and some of it perhaps of the 12th.

In the 15th century Nicod de Menthon served Duke Amédée de Savoie as ambassador to France, then as governor of Nice, and commanded as admiral the fleet the church council sent to Constantinople. At the Renaissance the medieval fortress was turned into a sumptuous residence and the seat of the barony of Menthon: apartments took the place of the wall-walks between the towers, and the family bought furniture in quantity.

The castle's general appearance held until 1740, when alterations were made for comfort: a suite of spacious, well-lit rooms was added on the lake side, among them the dining room and a hall of 100 square metres with four windows over the water. The one notable incident the château's history records came on 7 May 1793, when a band of insurgents led by Maurice Genand came down from the Thônes valley to take arms and ammunition from it, including two small cannon known as campagnardes. In 1809 it was bought by François Ruphy de Menthon de Lornay. Between 1860 and 1890 Count René de Menthon, a fervent disciple of Viollet-le-Duc, consolidated and heightened the walls, added the turrets and made the half-timbered gallery of the inner courtyard, giving the building the outline it carries now.

François de Menthon, of the same family, was a lawyer and a member of the Resistance who appeared as a prosecutor for France at the Nuremberg trials; he worked for the creation of a united Europe and was Minister of Justice under de Gaulle.

The château was listed as a monument historique by an order of 21 February 1989 and remains in Menthon hands. It opens from May to September, with a company of actors reviving its past in summer, and takes some 40,000 visitors a year; its library holds more than 12,000 works from before 1800, among them incunabula, manuscripts on parchment illuminated by medieval monks, and one of the rare complete editions of Diderot's Encyclopédie. The château is sometimes named as the inspiration for Walt Disney's Sleeping Beauty castle, as is Neuschwanstein.