Fort-la-Latte

The castle of La Roche-Goyon was raised on a rocky cape near Cap Fréhel by Étienne III Goüyon, lord of Matignon and a patrilineal ancestor of the present Monegasque monarch. Building began in the 1340s and the keep followed in 1365–1370; its upper chamber is still roofed by a ribbed ogive vault dated to 1340, and the Goüyon-Matignon emblem, a siren, crowns the keep passage.

The site did much of the defending itself. Cliffs sealed the cape against any landing from the sea, while the rock commanded clear views over the English Channel, the Emerald Coast and a large part of the bay of Saint-Malo — close to the trade routes linking Saint-Malo, Normandy and the Channel Islands. The builders had granite brought from the heart of Brittany and cut sandstone straight from the surrounding cliffs, where traces of the old quarries survive in coastal names such as "Port Taillé".

In 1379, following the return from exile of Duke Jean IV of Brittany, the castle was besieged by Bertrand Du Guesclin. It was attacked and taken a second time in 1597, during the Wars of Religion, when the Catholic League fell on a garrison loyal to Henri IV; the castle was partly burned and afterwards abandoned. The damage is still legible in the stone: the barbican gatehouse was destroyed by cannon shot and later rebuilt, the inner gatehouse lost its upper storey to the bombardment — only its two medieval towers survive — and a line of cannon strikes remains visible at the level of the keep's loopholes.

Ruin followed. In 1665 Colbert de Croissy described a castle of four towers around a great central keep, badly decayed and inhabited by nothing but a caretaker. It then belonged to François Gouyon de Matignon (1607–1675).

Under Louis XIV the cape recovered its strategic value and the medieval castle was converted into an artillery fort, a work associated with the architect Siméon Garangeau. Bastions were added, a chapel was built, and the courtyard was entirely backfilled so that cannon could be worked on it — the original medieval ground now lies up to eight metres below the surface, burying a square tower that archaeologists believe probably served as a watchtower.

Eight cannons were mounted, the largest eight metres long, their wheels guided on granite roller-tracks for aiming; military records allow one shot every three minutes. A shot oven was installed to heat cannonballs red-hot before firing, though it was rarely used — it devoured wood, took eight hours to heat, and a glowing ball risked igniting the powder in the barrel. A 20,000-litre rainwater cistern served the garrison of about forty men, since a well could not be dug into the granite, and a dummy drawbridge facing the sea was meant to lure attacking ships onto a stretch of violent currents — a trick that proved largely ineffective. The fort remained in service until the end of the First Empire, when changing military technology finally made it obsolete.

From 1892 the fort passed through a series of private owners. It was classified as a monument historique in 1925, with a further classification in 1934, and in 1931 the historian Frédéric Joüon Des Longrais — a lifelong devotee of archaeology — bought it and began a restoration that took more than twenty years. Electricity only reached the castle in 2001.

The Joüon Des Longrais family still owns the fort and has opened it to the public: "Les Médiévales du Fort La Latte", a medieval festival with jousting and falconry, has run every August since 2008. The cape has also had a long screen career — Richard Fleischer's The Vikings (1958), with Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis, staged its final fight on the keep, and a much larger fictionalised version of the fort appears in the animated April and the Extraordinary World (2015). Albert II, Prince of Monaco, visited privately in July 2012 in the footsteps of his Goyon-Matignon ancestors, and returned with his family on 9 April 2025 for the tricentenary of the death of Jacques III de Matignon.