Château de Bonnivet

Château de Bonnivet is a Renaissance castle in Vendée built as one of the grandest noble residences of its era. The structure featured an imposing facade flanked by corner towers and organized around a central courtyard typical of the period.

Guillaume II Gouffier, Admiral of France and King Francis I's favorite, commissioned the castle between 1515 and 1525 before his death at Pavia. After his death the structure passed to other families and was eventually dismantled in 1788, leaving only fragments.

The castle's name comes from the Bonnivet family who shaped this estate across generations. Today's visitors can still sense the family's presence in the remaining structures and their historical importance to the region.

Visitors can today only see the north wall of the courtyard from the 1600s, which has been listed as a Historical Monument since 2001. To learn more about the castle's former grandeur, artifacts and sculptures are displayed at the Sainte-Croix Museum in Poitiers and other collections.

Francois Rabelais used the castle as a model for the Abbey of Thélème in his novel Gargantua, making it the inspiration for one of French literature's most famous fictional structures. This literary connection shows how deeply the castle was woven into the artistic world of its time.