Château de Cassis wedding

The château sits on the rock directly above the port of Cassis, inside its own walls, with a keep at one end and the Cap Canaille behind it. It is a real fortification rather than a country house with battlements: stone ramparts, a powder magazine, vaulted rooms under brick barrel ceilings, and a terrace cut into the rampart that looks straight down at the harbour, the village and the sea.

Inside the walls the ground has been turned into gardens, with clipped hedges and cypresses around a long pool. The dinner happens there and the aperitif on the terrace, which is the arrangement the château recommends and the one its own photographs are of.

The hire starts at six in the evening, so the whole wedding is an evening rather than a day, and the spaces are used in a fixed order.

Cut into the rampart above the port, and where the aperitif goes. The sunset over the bay from here is the reason the château puts the drinks at this hour.

Inside the walls, hedged and cypress-lined, and where dinner is served. It is the largest space and the one the 130 is set by.

Two of the three ceremony settings, both sheltered. The third is the terrace itself, and the choice between them is made on the day according to the wind, which on this coast is a real variable rather than a polite one.

Under brick barrel ceilings with a stone fireplace, and where the music has to move at the midnight curfew. They are handsome, though they are not large, which is worth seeing before the guest list is fixed.

A Château de Cassis wedding starts from €120,000 and lands near €200,000 all-in for 80 to 130 guests.

The château does not price per head. A Friday, Saturday or public holiday is €20,000 including tax, and that takes the reception areas from six in the evening until four in the morning. Ending at midnight instead brings it to €18,000, with each extra hour charged, and a weekday on those shorter terms is €16,000. Moving the furniture and cleaning the château before and after are in the price, and a deposit of €2,000 holds the date.

The catering, which comes from a single named house rather than from a list, and cannot be replaced; the security officer, whose presence is compulsory, and the firm that manages the flow of guests and suppliers and watches the pool; the rooms; the flowers, the music and the photography; the shuttles; the babysitters; and the brunch the next day, which is not part of the package.

Eight rooms and suites sleeping twenty, or twenty-two with the two extra beds the château can put in. They run from the Haut Donjon in the keep, with a terrace over the village and the port, through a family suite and a Moroccan suite in the garden, to two junior suites and two superior suites with sea views and large private terraces.

The eight bedrooms go as one block for the night, breakfast included, and they are the only beds on the rock. There is no room service. Everyone beyond the twenty stays in Cassis itself, five minutes down the hill, which has more hotel rooms than anywhere else within half an hour.

The château stands above Cassis in the Bouches-du-Rhône, between the calanques and the Cap Canaille, on the Traverse du Château.

Marseille is 32 minutes, Aix-en-Provence 42 and Toulon-Hyères 53. Nice is two hours and a quarter, which places this firmly in Provence rather than on the Riviera whatever the sea outside suggests.

Marseille is 57 minutes and is the airport to build a guest list around. Marseille Saint-Charles takes the TGV from Paris in a little over three hours, which for European guests is the better arrival.

This needs its own paragraph, because it is unlike anywhere else.

The château’s public-assembly authorisation allows three vehicles on the property. Everybody else parks in the Madie car park down in Cassis and comes up either by the little tourist train, which carries forty at a time, or by shuttle. Suppliers may unload only, and the car park has to be empty an hour before the guests arrive.

The arrival is the plan here, not a detail of it. A hundred and thirty guests and three parking spaces means the evening begins with a shuttle operation timed to the minute, and the tourist train moving forty at a time takes the better part of an hour to bring everyone up. We always build the schedule backwards from the six o’clock start and treat the transfers as the first line of the budget rather than the last.

The compensation is the setting, which nothing nearby matches.

Dinner inside the walls of a fortified château, with the port lit below and the Cap Canaille behind, is a room no marquee can imitate. The evening start also suits it: guests arrive as the heat goes, the aperitif catches the sunset over the bay, and dinner runs into the dark.

The third thing is the children rule, which the château states more bluntly than most and means. It calls itself a dangerous place for children, names the pool, the uneven floors and the unprotected roofs, and requires babysitters for the ten it allows. That is not a formality and it should be budgeted and booked rather than argued with.

Magic Day plans weddings at Château de Cassis from the first conversation to the final farewell. That means the date and which of the three rates it falls under, the symbolic ceremony and the mairie paperwork behind it, the menu with the château’s own caterer, the security and flow management the château requires, the shuttle and the tourist train that bring 130 guests up the hill, the eight rooms and the hotel block in Cassis below, and the babysitters.

We have worked across Provence and the South of France for years. Tell us the date you are considering and how many people, and we will tell you what the evening costs and how long the arrival really takes.