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In the 11th century a fortress belonging to Hugues de Champchevrier stood in place of the current Château de Champchevrier. It passed by marriage to different families: the Laval, the Bastarnay, and then the Daillon in 1550. On the ruins of the fortress, the Daillons rebuilt a Renaissance castle, whose mullion windows you can still see.
Henri de Daillon had no son so his nephew, Antoine, Duke de Roquelaure, a Marshal of France, inherited the castle in 1686. He built courtyards, gardens and moats all around the castle. Antoine de Roquelaure had no son either and as his wife preferred the court of Versailles to Champchevrier, he sold the castle in 1728 to Jean-Baptiste Pierre Henri de la Rüe du Can. The new owner was made Baron of Champchevrier by Louis XV in 1741 by letters patent which made the Champchevrier estate into a barony. The present owners are his direct descendants and so the same family has owned the castle for nearly three centuries.
The first baron built the terrace on the East side (first half of the 18th century). He was very committed to improving the estate and created the fine views from all sides of the castle towards the surrounding forest.
Today Château de Champchevrier is open to the public and hosts events.
References:The Pilgrimage Church of Wies (Wieskirche) is an oval rococo church, designed in the late 1740s by Dominikus Zimmermann. It is located in the foothills of the Alps in the municipality of Steingaden.
The sanctuary of Wies is a pilgrimage church extraordinarily well-preserved in the beautiful setting of an Alpine valley, and is a perfect masterpiece of Rococo art and creative genius, as well as an exceptional testimony to a civilization that has disappeared.
The hamlet of Wies, in 1738, is said to have been the setting of a miracle in which tears were seen on a simple wooden figure of Christ mounted on a column that was no longer venerated by the Premonstratensian monks of the Abbey. A wooden chapel constructed in the fields housed the miraculous statue for some time. However, pilgrims from Germany, Austria, Bohemia, and even Italy became so numerous that the Abbot of the Premonstratensians of Steingaden decided to construct a splendid sanctuary.