Château de Chillon

Where it sits. Chillon stands on a small oval rock in Lake Geneva a few metres off the shore at Veytaux, three kilometres south-east of Montreux, connected to land by a short covered bridge. The position is the entire explanation for the building. Here the Dents de Morcles and the Rochers-de-Naye come down almost to the water and leave a strip of shoreline barely wide enough for a road — the only land route between the Alpine passes to the south and the Swiss plateau to the north. Anyone holding this rock held the road, and could tax everyone on it. On the lake side the bottom drops away sharply to more than a hundred metres, so the castle could never be undermined or approached in force from the water. The result is a fortress with two entirely different faces: a blank, high, military wall toward the shore, and a picturesque cluster of towers and shuttered windows toward the lake.

The story behind it. The rock was occupied in the Bronze Age and used by the Romans, and a castle is documented here from 1005. The Counts of Savoy took control in the twelfth century and made it their principal stronghold on the lake; Peter II of Savoy rebuilt it on a grand scale in the 1260s with the master builder Pierre Mainier, adding the round keep, the great halls and the curtain walls that give the castle its present outline. In 1536 the Bernese took Chillon after a short siege and held it for 262 years as an administrative seat, arsenal and prison, until the Vaudois revolution of 1798. Today it belongs to the canton of Vaud and is the most-visited historic monument in Switzerland, with roughly 400,000 visitors a year.

The prisoner. Beneath the castle, cut partly into the living rock, runs a Gothic underground chamber with a row of pillars and a vaulted ceiling, its floor still the bare stone of the island. François Bonivard, prior of Saint-Victor in Geneva, was chained to the fourth pillar here from 1532 to 1536 for supporting the Genevan republicans against the Duke of Savoy. Lord Byron came on 26 June 1816 with Percy Bysshe Shelley, was shown the pillar, and wrote The Prisoner of Chillon within days, at Ouchy near Lausanne, while waiting out bad weather. A signature reading "Byron" is cut into the third pillar and is displayed as his; whether he carved it himself has been argued about ever since.

On screen, and before screens. Chillon's celebrity is literary rather than cinematic, and that is exactly what makes it relevant to anyone interested in how places become destinations. Rousseau set part of Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse on this shore in 1761 and started the traffic. Byron's poem industrialised it: within a generation Chillon was a fixed stop on the Grand Tour, then on Thomas Cook's first conducted tours of Switzerland from 1863, and the castle's own visitors' book carries Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, Charles Dickens and Mark Twain. Gustave Courbet painted it repeatedly from the lake in the 1870s. In other words, Chillon was the prototype of the location people travel to because of a story told about it — the same mechanism that now sends travellers to a Salzburg gazebo or a Riviera hairpin. The castle's own screen work has been correspondingly modest and mostly documentary: it plays itself, or a generic medieval lakeside fortress, in television period drama and advertising, and the producers who want a castle on water in Europe have been coming to look at it for eighty years.

What you actually see today. The visit is a self-guided route through about twenty-five buildings arranged around three courtyards, and it takes an hour and a half done properly. The sequence runs from the underground vaults up through the storerooms, the Bernese bedchamber, the Great Hall of the Count with its painted beams and lake windows, the Coat of Arms Room with the arms of the Bernese bailiffs, the chapel with fourteenth-century wall paintings, and finally the keep, which is climbed on wooden stairs for a view down the lake to the Rhône delta. Explanatory panels are multilingual and unusually good on the archaeology.

Getting there and timing. Trains stop at Veytaux-Chillon, a five-minute walk away; trolleybus 201 runs from Montreux and Vevey; and the lakeside path from Montreux is a pleasant forty-minute walk past villas and palm trees. CGN paddle steamers call at the castle's own pier in season, which is far and away the best arrival. The castle is open daily except Christmas and New Year. Coach groups fill the courtyards between eleven and three; the first hour after opening and the last two before closing are markedly calmer, and in winter you can have the vaults almost to yourself.