Château de Brest
The Château de Brest (Breton: Kastell Brest) is a castle in Brest, Finistère, France. The oldest monument in the town, it is located at the mouth of the river Penfeld at the heart of the roadstead of Brest, one of the largest roadsteads in the world. From the Roman castellum to Vauban's citadel, the site has over 1700 years of history, holding right up to the present day its original role as a military fortress and a strategic location of the highest importance. It is thus the oldest castle in the world still in use, and was classified as a monument historique on 21 March 1923.[1]
The structure's heterogeneous architecture has been the result of continual adaptations to developments in siege warfare and armament on land and sea. The château stands on the opposite bank to the Tour Tanguy combining to defend the entrance to the Penfeld.
History[edit]
Origins[edit]
The site was inhabited during the Lower Palaeolithic (300,000 BC) and in the Neolithic agricultural activity occurred on the site. Other coastal populations are known in the 6th and 4th centuries BC and the rocky spur was occupied until the end of the Iron Age. Its remarkable position allows a hypothesis that the site held a prehistoric fortification, but the first fort of which evidence remains is from the Roman era.
Around 500 BC, a tribe of merchants and sailors in leather barks known as the Osismii peopled the region. To them are to be attributed the gold coinage discovered around Brest, as well as a road predating the Roman presence in the area. The tribe's territory (roughly equivalent to today's Finistère) was bordered to the south by the territory of the Veneti and to the east by that of the Curiosolites, with its capital at Vorgium (Carhaix). This end of the world (Finis terrae) only saw Roman occupation very late in the Roman period.
Musée national de la Marine[edit]
Since 1955, the castle has also housed collections from the Musée national de la Marine. This makes it a kind of heir to the ship models room installed on the first floor of the sculpture workshop in the Brest arsenal in 1826. The collections evacuated during the Second World War were transferred into the tours Paradis in 1958. In 2018, the Napoleonic imperial barge of 1810 was removed from display in the Paris museum to be restored for return to Brest and display here. An extension to the museum in the keep was completed in 1985.
It displays famous sculptures by Yves Collet (Mars, Amphitrite, Minerve and Neptune, guarding the road), ship models, sculptures paintings and other objects related to the development of the prison, the military port, the naval constructions and maritime life of Brest.