Château de Chareil-Cintrat, Renaissance castle in Chareil-Cintrat, France.

Château de Chareil-Cintrat is a late medieval castle with a rectangular main block and two round towers at its north-west and south-west corners. The walls are pale weathered stone, the steep hipped roof and the conical tower roofs are covered with red tiles, and the facade windows sit beneath small red-tiled hoods. A gravel path crosses the foreground.

The Chareil family built the castle at the end of the Middle Ages. In the early 16th century, Claude Morin, a war commissioner enriched during the Italian Wars, rebuilt and decorated it with painted cycles inspired by Italian Renaissance art. In 1589, during the Wars of Religion, the castle was besieged. The French state bought it on 10 October 1958, the year it was classified as a monument historique.

The painted decoration mixes classical and Roman models with Mannerist grotesques. On the vault of the first flight of the staircase, Roman gods appear as birds: the owl for Minerva, the peacock for Juno and the eagle for Jupiter. In a first-floor room, each medallion shows a planet as a deity, with Apollo at the centre, and the chariot wheels carry zodiac signs.

The castle stands below the village of Chareil, in the Bouble valley near its confluence with the Veauvre, at the foot of a hill once planted with vines. The grounds are uneven and partly gravel, so sturdy shoes help. The building is cared for by the Centre des monuments nationaux and is open to visitors.

The grounds contain an area dedicated to preserving old grape varieties from the Chareil-Cintrat and Saint-Pourçain wine regions. This living collection shows the castle's connection to winemaking in its surroundings across many generations.