About this site: an independent guide
An independent guide to one castle: the Château de Castelnaud, the fortress and Musée de la guerre au Moyen Âge standing above the Dordogne at Castelnaud-la-Chapelle, about nine kilometres from Sarlat-la-Canéda. The site exists to answer the practical questions — the hours, the tariff, where to park, what the hour inside covers, when the trebuchet is fired — and to compare the six GetYourGuide listings that work around the castle. It is not the castle, which is privately owned and privately run and has its own site at castelnaud.com. It is not the tourist office, it takes no bookings, and it is not connected to any tour operator.
The premise
Castelnaud is easy to enter and takes planning to make a day of. It opens every day of the year, there is no timed slot and no reservation for individuals, so nothing about getting in needs arranging in advance. What does need thought is everything around it: which car park, the climb up through the village, when the trebuchet is fired, whether an hour inside is enough, and what to put on the other half of the day. So that is how this site is organised. The whole visit, explained in one page, or the two car parks, compared.
The castle’s ticket is not sold on the booking platform
This is the single fact that shapes the rest of the site, so it is stated here plainly. Not one listing on GetYourGuide includes admission to the Château de Castelnaud. The activity that once carried it is delisted: every URL form for it now redirects to the location page, and that page returns canoe rentals and nothing else. Entry is bought at the castle itself or on castelnaud.com, every day of the year.
What the platform does sell is the valley the castle was built to command, and that is genuinely worth booking ahead. Two canoe routes from Vitrac pass directly beneath the walls. A balloon from Cénac flies over the whole of it. A guided half day out of Sarlat works Beynac village, the river and Domme. A private half day includes a guided hour inside a castle. And the entry ticket for Beynac, the rival fortress across the water, is the one castle interior in this valley anybody can fix in advance. Every page that carries a listing says which of those it is before it says anything else — all six, compared, and each one reviewed.
Where the facts come from
A short list of sources, all read on 16 September 2026, and nothing that is not in them. The castle publishes its own opening notice, its 2026 tariff and its activities programme; those are taken from its own site and the tariff is printed once, as a table, on tickets and 2026 prices. The Kléber Rossillon group, which owns and runs the castle, supplies the visitor figures. The Dordogne-Périgord departmental tourist board and an official brochure supply the seasonal hours grid, because the castle publishes its own hours as images rather than as text. The commune and the village site supply the car parks. French and English Wikipedia carry the building history and the collection figures behind the history page. And the six listings publish their own inclusion and exclusion lists, which are reproduced line by line.
Where sources disagree, the page says so rather than picking a figure. The seasonal hours are written as the hours the tourist board publishes, with a note to check the castle’s own page on the day, because they are not the castle’s own text. The collection is written as the castle’s own figure of more than 250 weapons and pieces of armour, with the higher count in French Wikipedia attributed to French Wikipedia. Visitor numbers are given as around a quarter of a million a year, because the group and Wikipedia give different totals for different years. The museum, in detail.
What this site will not print
It will not invent a number. No source gives the gradient of the climb from the river or a step count for it, so the pages say a short climb from the upper car park and a longer one from the water and stop there. No source names the commander of the 1442 siege, so this site does not name one either, whatever the blogs say. What is actually documented. It will not repeat the picture of two garrisons trading fire across the river: Castelnaud held for the English and Beynac for the French, and no battle between the two castles is documented anywhere. The comparison, with the legend taken out. And it will not let a page imply that the full-size war machines on the bastion are the ones fired in the demonstration; the fired trebuchet is a separate machine at a third scale. Which machine is which.
How prices are written here
Three conventions, applied everywhere. In prose, tour prices are spoken approximations rather than exact figures: platform prices move with the season and the option chosen, and a number typed into a sentence goes stale where a rounded phrase stays true. In the widgets, the live figure is whatever the platform is charging as you read it, and that is the one to trust. In one table, on tickets and 2026 prices, the castle’s own 2026 rates are printed exactly as the castle publishes them, because that is a source document and the comparison is the point of the page. Comparison tables elsewhere carry approximate figures marked as approximate, and nothing else.
How it pays for itself
The tour cards and the booking widgets link to GetYourGuide, which pays a commission on bookings made through them. You pay the platform’s price either way. The castle’s own ticket is the castle’s, is sold only by the castle, and earns this site nothing at all, which is worth saying on a site whose main subject is a castle it cannot sell you. The affiliate disclosure sets out what the commission does and does not change. Hours, rates and listings all move; where a page here is behind the castle’s own notice, the notice is right, and a message to contact gets the page fixed.