Tour Brune, Fortified tower in Embrun, France

The Tour Brune is a square keep of rough light-grey stone standing beside Notre-Dame d'Embrun Cathedral. Its walls are 1.80 m thick and rise 27 m to a flat, crenellated terrace with rounded arches beneath the merlons, added in 1927. Three narrow, grilled openings pierce the front facade, and a round-capped turret sits behind the parapet.

The Tour Brune is a former keep of the archbishops of Embrun, one of the last remains of the episcopal complex built from the 13th century against the oldest part of the archbishop's palace, beside Notre-Dame cathedral. It served as a watchtower like those of Réallon and Saint-Clément-sur-Durance, then as a treasury, arsenal, residence, store and occasionally a prison; drawings by Napoleonic prisoners survive. After 1789, when the palace became a barracks, it held the barracks' water. The town bought it in 1934; it was classified as a monument historique on 5 March 1927.

The tower's name comes from its old form, tour d'Ambrune. Since 11 July 1996 it has held the first museum of landscape in France, a permanent exhibition of the Parc national des Écrins: rock and time on the ground level, water and light above, memory of space, then men and territories, and pays et paysages on the terrace. The displays were designed by Pascale Mottura of Prospective & Patrimoine.

The tower stands in the centre of Embrun, opposite Notre-Dame Cathedral. Since 1996 it has housed the permanent exhibition of the Parc national des Écrins, the first museum of landscape in the park. The top terrace, reached by a walkway at the level of the chemin de ronde, holds an orientation table.

The crenellated roofline that crowns the tower today is not medieval but was added in the late 1920s, inspired by the Palace of the Popes in Avignon. Before that, the tower had a wooden pyramidal roof that has since disappeared entirely.