Tour de Guinette (donjon royal d'Étampes)

Étampes

On its promontory above Étampes stands one of the strangest keeps in France: four half-towers joined in a four-leaf clover, remnant of the royal castle raised in the 12th century on a site fortified since Robert the Pious around 1020. But it is a marital drama that brought the Tour de Guinette into legend. On 14 August 1193, Philip Augustus married Ingeborg, an eighteen-year-old princess of Denmark. On the very morrow of the wedding, the king, seized with an aversion for her that no chronicler has ever explained — there was talk of a spell — sought to have the marriage annulled. Ingeborg refused repudiation and maintained that she was queen of France. She would pay for it with twenty years of confinement: from 1201, it was in the tower of Étampes that she was shut up, for some twelve years, poorly clothed, supported by the pope, who placed the kingdom under interdict while the king lived as a bigamist with Agnes of Merania. Rehabilitated in 1213, when Philip Augustus took her back as queen, Ingeborg would outlive the king and die in 1236, venerated for her piety. The fortress, besieged by John the Fearless in 1411, was dismantled on the orders of Henri IV after the Wars of Religion, became a dovecote, then a romantic ruin watching over the trains of RER line C. Étampes tradition still calls this keep "the queen's prison".

Getting there : Access by the chemin de Guinette or from 9 boulevard Henri-IV, above Étampes station (RER C); exterior and promontory freely accessible, interior closed since 2018, under restoration (Mission Patrimoine) until summer 2026. Sourced coordinates (montjoye.net).

Opening times and access details are given as a guide only: check before you set out.

Ambient sound