Caves Troglodytiques de Bourré
Fifteen kilometres east of Chenonceau, the village of Bourré hides an extraordinary subterranean world: a network of tufa-stone caves quarried since the 15th century — the same stone used to build the Loire châteaux — that today shelter a working mushroom farm, a wine cellar and a village of carved stone houses literally inside the cliff face.
The Champignonnière and the Carved City
The guided tour of La Ville Souterraine takes you through a kilometre of cool, lamp-lit galleries where artisans have carved an entire miniature village — church, market, houses — directly into the tufa walls over decades. It is genuinely eccentric and genuinely impressive, the kind of place that makes you feel you've stumbled onto something the guidebooks forgot.
Adjacent to the carved village, the working champignonnière (mushroom farm) produces several tonnes of mushrooms a year in the naturally humid, 14°C caves. The tour explains the full cultivation process and ends with a tasting — the mushrooms are sold fresh at the cave entrance.
The Wine Caves and How to Visit
Several independent vignerons in Bourré also use the caves as natural wine cellars, maintaining a constant temperature ideal for ageing Touraine whites and the local sparkling Montlouis-sur-Loire. A few offer informal tastings directly from the cave — ask at the village tourist office on arrival.
Bourré is a 20-minute drive from Chenonceau along the D176 and D62. It sees a fraction of the château crowds and feels genuinely off the tourist trail — a sharp contrast to the polished visitor experience at the big châteaux.
Caves Troglodytiques de Bourré on video
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