Close up

As you climb the main staircase in the château d'Azay-le-Rideau, there is a balcony on each level that is open to the courtyard below. This is part of the western wing seen from the highest level. The castle is shaped like an "L." I read somewhere (I don't remember where, now) that one of the owners had plans to add to the castle to make it a square, enclosing the courtyard, but the plans were never carried through.

A portion of the western wing and its round corner tower.

There are two options for seeing the interior: a guided tour or a self-guided tour. Visitors can rent headsets to hear descriptions of the rooms for the self-guided tour, or they can do what we did: wander around just looking. There is descriptive information posted in each room, but you have to wait for the person ahead of you to finish reading. At one point in our wandering, we bumped up against a guided tour that had the whole place blocked up. We stood, with other wanderers, in a tiny spiral stairwell for about five minutes before we were able to push and shove our way through to get ahead of them.