Belcastel: Finding The Right Village

In 2020, after the end of lockdown, I looked for cute cities to visit near Toulouse, and I found Belcastel. This cute little village looked perfect: a castle and cute little streets. Since shops were closed, I needed places that were beautiful on their own. Belcastel was also close to Toulouse: 40 minutes by car. But was it though?

Failures to reach the true Belcastel

I was supposed to go with two friends, L. and N. and everything was planned. However, in the morning, right before departing, I realized that there were several villages called Belcastel. There was the one that I saw online and that was located in Aveyron, nearly two hours away. But there was also this other one in Tarn, that was the one 40 minutes away. Since I was a bit tired that weekend and didn’t want to drive for 2 hours, I asked my friends if it was OK to try the less known Belcastel, in Tarn. They said OK.

We drove for a while, more than 40 minutes actually, and finally arrived in the village of Belcastel… And ther was pretty much nothing. Don’t get me wrong, the village was cute. But nothing extraordinary. Also, despite its name, there was no castle. Only a big tower. We found the town hall and managed to go to the toilets. Nothing was open, so it was impossible to buy water and N. didn’t take any. It really was not what we expected (even though we didn’t expect much). We walked around the village and then to the Retenue de Briax, a manmade lake. We came back, saw some weird cat farm, and that was pretty much it. We went to visit another closeby village before going back home. It was a weird adventure, but we laughed about it.

After that, I realized one of my friends was living in Rodez, in Aveyron. Twice, when I went to visit her, I suggested visiting Belcastel. Unfortunately, the weather was never good and we didn’t go.

Success at last: visiting Belcastel in May 2021

Nearly exactly one year after discovering the existence of Belcastel, I managed to visit the village. Last week, with my friend E., we drove 20 minutes from Rodez and reached our destination. I was not disappointed: the village is beautiful. However, it is surprisingly small. If you want to visit the whole village and the castle, it can take two hours, not much more. That being said, there are several nice bars and you could take the time to drink something next to the river.

The castle’s entrance is 10 euros. It offers cool views on the village, but it’s not very big, so don’t expect much. There are some interesting stories about the founders of the village and about ghosts, and you can visit most of the rooms. You can also sleep there as it is also a hotel. The decoration is, in my opinion, not great. They mixed historical elements with very modern and sometimes ugly paintings. I truly didn’t understand the pink baby with antennas pushing a metal tower. If you want to show some art, you should at least indicate a title and the name of the artist. Anyway, maybe some of you would like it, but I didn’t.

I much preferred walking in the village to visiting the castle, but it was interesting nonetheless. If you go to the tourist information center, they give you a map of the village to see some ancient places like old bread ovens or the place where the blacksmith was shoeing the horses.