- Département
- Marne (Grand Est region)
- Site
- Countryside around Châlons-en-Champagne
- Inhabitants
- 299 (2023)
- Source
- Wikipedia, eigene Zusammenfassung
Villers-le-Château is a small commune in the Marne département, in the countryside around Châlons-en-Champagne. It is known for its 16th-century château, not for champagne vineyards.
Villers-le-Château lies in the Marne département in the Grand Est region. It has 299 inhabitants (2023) and covers 20.82 square kilometres. The village is not classified as grand cru or premier cru, and it is not a classic winemaking village. A visit here shows you the quiet, rural side of Champagne.
Location
The commune belongs to the catchment area of Châlons-en-Champagne, where it counts as part of the surrounding countryside. Administratively it forms part of the Communauté d'agglomération Cités en Champagne, which was created on 1 January 2014 through the merger of several groupings of communes. The statistics office Insee classes Villers-le-Château as a rural commune with a scattered settlement pattern. The area is drained by the Pisseleu and a few smaller watercourses belonging to the Seine basin.
Land use and climate
The landscape is shaped by arable farming: in 2018, 97.4 per cent of the land was farmland, with just 1.3 per cent each given over to buildings and woodland. The available data shows no vineyard area for the commune. So if it is champagne you are after, you are better off in the wine villages of the region.
Administratively it forms part of the Communauté d'agglomération Cités en Champagne, which was created on 1 January 2014 through the merger of several groupings of communes.
The climate is temperate with cool summers (Köppen-Geiger class Cfb). The nearest Météo-France weather station, in Fagnières, four kilometres away, records an annual mean temperature of 11.2 °C and an average of 632.3 millimetres of rainfall for the period 1991 to 2020. On 25 July 2019 the thermometer there climbed to 41.8 °C, and on 6 January 1985 it fell to minus 21 °C.
Name and history
Until 1919 the village was called Villers-aux-Corneilles, roughly "Villers of the crows". It is first recorded in 1101 as "Villare". The element Villers derives from the Gallo-Roman "villare", a large country estate. The commune has borne its present name since 1919, taken from the château.
The lordship passed in 1693 to the Saguez family, who held it until the death of Philippe Maurice Saguez in 1744. It then went to Jean Baptiste Rosnay, a musketeer of the king. His family still owned it in 1789.
Sights
- Château de Villers-le-Château: a fairly spacious, square building with four small towers, dating from the 16th century and surrounded by a park in the French style. It stands on the site of an earlier predecessor.
- Église Saint-Maurice: the village's parish church.
For lovers of good food and wine, Villers-le-Château is mainly worth a quiet stop along the way. The château makes a pleasant detour if you are in Châlons-en-Champagne anyway.
Pictures
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