Rick Steves Adores One Particularly Captivating French Chateau Above All The Rest In Paris

You're likely familiar with the most famous château in France, Louis XIV's palace of Versailles. While you can spend the night in the castle and enjoy all its luxury and opulence, travel pro Rick Steves has another recommendation for you: the Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte. This shining jewel sits about 50 miles away from central Paris and is one you cannot skip. On his website, Steves describes it as "flat-out ravishing, with a harmony of architecture, interior decor, and garden design that's unrivaled." In fact, he says it's "the most beautiful château in all of France." It's pretty hard to argue with that assessment. Once the home of Nicolas Fouquet, the king's finance minister, the château was completed in 1661. In fact, Louis XIV attended a party there that year and poached his design team for Versailles after putting Fouquet in prison.

Fouquet's hiring of a team to create this beautiful spot was a new concept back then. He acquired the services of architect Louis le Vau, painter Charles le Brun, and landscaper André le Nôtre, whose garden design is famous to this day. In fact, a 2014 film loosely based on le Nôtre called "A Little Chaos," starring Kate Winslet and Matthias Schoenaerts and directed by Alan Rickman, is a lovely watch. The château has a permanent exhibition on le Nôtre in the basement, as his work inspired a change in garden design throughout western Europe.

The château isn't open all year, so check the dates of your visit. However, you may want to plan your trip around them because on Saturday evenings from June through October and Friday evenings in July and August, the château holds candle-lit evenings, with 2,000 candles illuminating the building. During the day, you can spend hours here, wandering the breathtaking gardens and the château itself. Electric buggies are also available for rent. Kids can wear rental period costumes and play old-fashioned wooden games in the garden.

Inside the château, you can visit the ground floor's Great Square room and even the king's bedroom, full of baroque decor and lovely tapestries. The top floor features the apartments of Fouquet and his wife and incredible art. The basement houses the kitchen, so you can see how residents in a castle of this size were fed. Another feature (for an additional fee) is a trip to the top for a 360-degree view. Rick Steves says, "A highlight of one memorable trip was climbing under centuries-old exposed timbers through the attic of Vaux-le-Vicomte before popping out on the rooftop to a view of the spectacular garden."

Tickets can be booked online or purchased at the door. If you're staying in Paris, you can take a train from Paris Gare de Lyon to Gare de Melun, which takes about half an hour and costs less than $3. There are shuttle buses from the station to the château. Steves' brilliant tip about finding train station luggage lockers can be useful, as Gare de Lyon has them. However, he warns us not to make the common transit mistake of not having a ticket on you because, despite the honors system, you could be fined.