About this site

Who writes here

My name is Colette Brissard. I kept a bookshop on the rue Nationale for thirty years and I live on the rue Victor-Hugo, the lane that runs under the château cliff from the ramp to the Clos Lucé. I walk past the rock most days and I have been answering visitors’ questions about it, over a counter, since long before anyone had a website.

This site exists out of a mild, thirty-year irritation. Every summer I watched people arrive expecting Chambord, spend fifty minutes, and leave puzzled that it was over so quickly — because nobody had told them that most of the château was pulled down in the nineteenth century, which is the one fact that makes the visit make sense. And every summer I watched people pay for a guide without knowing that the château runs its own, included in the ticket.

What this site is, and what it is not

It is not the official site of the monument. The Château Royal d’Amboise belongs to the Fondation Saint-Louis, a private foundation, described on this page. I speak for them in no way whatsoever. Nor am I a tour operator: I organise nothing, I guide nobody, and I sell no entry.

What I do comes down to three things. I explain what you are actually visiting and why the hour is short, on the history page and how long to allow. I say plainly that there is no online entrance ticket and that the ticket you buy at the gate includes the guided visits — the bookings page and this one. And I am careful about Leonardo: he died five hundred metres up my street, and whether the bones under the slab are his is a genuinely open question that the signage does not raise.

How it is written

In the first person, because somebody wrote it. No page here quotes a visitor review word for word or attributes one to a first name: where I describe what people say, I describe what recurs across many of them, which is the only honest way to use that material. Ratings and review counts are the figures I noted at my last reading; the booking modules show the live ones.

I do not publish prices. They move every season, a number left on a page is wrong within months, and what actually matters — that one ticket covers the whole site, that the guided visits and the tablet are included, that a long list of visitors pays nothing — does not move. That is on the costs page.

How it is funded

Through affiliate links to GetYourGuide. If you book something through a link here, the site earns a commission and you pay no more than you would otherwise. It costs me nothing to tell you that the best guided visit at Amboise is free and that the entrance ticket cannot be bought online, and I have said both on almost every page, which should tell you what the commission does and does not buy. The full statement is on the disclosure page.

Corrections

Opening hours change, towers close for the rampart works described on this page, and I get things wrong. If you have just been and something here is out of date, write to me at [email protected] and I will fix it. The contact page says what is useful to include.