Domaine dit Désert de Retz

Chambourcy

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Prices: from €10.00
Visit duration: 90 min
Where: Chambourcy

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Open within 20 km

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Domaine dit Désert de Retz stands in Chambourcy (Yvelines), in the Île-de-France region of France. The building is listed as a historic monument (dating recorded in the Mérimée database: fourth quarter of the 18th century). Adult admission costs 10 EUR. Its opening hours and prices were verified at the source on September 5, 2026.

The Désert de Retz is a landscape garden laid out in the late eighteenth century by François Racine de Monville, an aristocrat with a passion for architecture and botany. Across the 17 hectares that survive today, visitors follow a path punctuated by unusual follies, a broken column, a temple, a Tartar tent, a ruined church, conceived as stages of a symbolic journey through antiquity, an imagined orient and Enlightenment thought. Long left to decay before being restored, the site can be visited on the edge of the Marly forest.

Written from Désert de Retz

What to know

The grounds occupy wooded, uneven terrain, so visitors should expect to walk on natural paths.
Seven follies remain from the roughly twenty originally built.
The site has been a listed historic monument since 1941.
Entry is free on the Sunday of the European Heritage Days.
The visit takes place outdoors, so appropriate clothing for the season is advisable.