Château de Hautefort: the 1968 fire and the fight for its rebirth

On the night of 30 to 31 August 1968, the Château de Hautefort burns. A cigarette stub tossed into the attic is all it takes to set the timber ablaze: within hours, nearly thirty years of painstaking restoration by Baroness Simone de Bastard go up in smoke. Only the blackened outer walls remain standing by morning. What could have been the end of one of the Périgord Noir’s finest châteaux instead becomes the starting point for a relentless reconstruction, carried out over a decade by a woman who refused to let the monument she had spent her life saving disappear. This story, long overshadowed in visitors’ itineraries, now takes centre stage: since May 2025, a 360° immersive room recounts that night within the château itself, and the European Heritage Days on 19 and 20 September 2026 dedicate an entire exhibition to it.