About this site: an independent guide
An independent guide to one castle: the Château de Beynac, the fortress standing more than 150 metres above the Dordogne at Beynac-et-Cazenac, about 10 km from Sarlat-la-Canéda. The site exists to answer the practical questions — the hours, the tariff, where to park, how steep the lane is, what the hour inside covers — and to compare the five GetYourGuide products that get people there. It is not the castle, which is privately owned and privately run and has its own site at chateau-beynac.com. It is not the tourist office, it takes no bookings, and it is not connected to any tour operator.
The premise
The Château de Beynac is easy to enter and hard to reach. It opens every day of the year, individuals cannot reserve and there is no timed slot, so there is no queue to plan around. What goes wrong happens before the door: every car park in the commune is paid, all year, the upper one fills first in summer, the lane up from the river climbs 150 metres, and outside roughly July and August no scheduled bus stops in the village at all. So this site is organised around getting there, choosing a time, and deciding what to pair the castle with. The whole visit, explained in one page, or the parking, lot by lot.
Where the facts come from
Five sources, and nothing that is not in them, all read on 16 September 2026. The castle publishes its own opening hours and its 2026 tariff; both are taken from its own site and the tariff is printed once, as a table, on tickets and prices. The commune of Beynac-et-Cazenac publishes the parking order, which is where the lots, the hours and the rates on the parking page come from. The Sarlat and Périgord Noir tourist offices supply the road distances, the airports and the facilities. The Mérimée monument record and the standard references carry the listing date and the building history behind the history page. And the five listings publish their own inclusion and exclusion lists, which are reproduced line by line, so a product that includes castle admission and a product that walks the village below it are labelled as such wherever they appear.
Where sources disagree, the page says so rather than picking a figure. The castle’s own two pages give different closing times for July and August, so the hours page says there is a late closing in high summer and sends you to the castle’s own page on the day. The summer bus timetable that was online when this site was written covered the 2025 window, so the site says roughly July and August and tells you to check the current one. Ownership is written as privately owned and privately run, because the sourced trail stops at a 1999 bequest and this site does not guess past it.
What it will not print
It will not invent a distance. No source publishes the kilometres or the drive time from Beynac to Castelnaud, Marqueyssac, Domme or Lascaux, so those pages say across the river or a short drive and leave it there. It will not repeat the claim that Richard the Lionheart built Beynac: he disposed of the castle in 1194 and gave it to his captain Mercadier, and the castle he built is in Normandy. The whole story. It will not call Beynac a ruin, because it is one of the best-preserved fortresses in the region, with furnished rooms, painted ceilings and a kitchen still in place. And it will not frame any of the five listings as a way past a queue, because there is no queue.
How prices are written here
Three conventions, applied everywhere. In prose, tour prices are spoken approximations, never exact figures: platform prices move with the season and the option chosen, and a number typed into a sentence goes stale where a rounded phrase stays true. In the widgets, the live figure is whatever GetYourGuide is charging as you read, which is the one to trust. In one table, on tickets and prices, the castle’s own 2026 rates are printed exactly as the castle publishes them, because that is a source document and the comparison is the point of the page. Comparison tables elsewhere carry approximate figures marked as approximate, and nothing else.
How it pays for itself
The tour cards and the booking widgets link to GetYourGuide, which pays a commission on bookings made through them. You pay the platform’s price either way, and the castle’s own ticket is the castle’s and has nothing to do with this site. The affiliate disclosure sets out what that does and does not change. Hours and rates move; where a page here is behind the castle’s own notice, the notice is right, and a message to contact gets the page fixed.