Coverage · France
Fontainebleau
Fontainebleau built its reputation around a royal château that shaped French history for nearly 900 years, from a medieval hunting lodge to the palace where Napoleon signed his abdication in 1814. The surrounding 25,000-hectare forest, a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, gave the world the Barbizon School of painters and some of the strangest sandstone rock formations in Europe. Beyond the château, the area hides baroque masterpieces, medieval river towns, and an inn where 19th-century artists painted on the walls instead of paying their bills.
23+ researched places in the app
Places researched in this city
A selection of the 23 places we've researched in this city. The full set is in the Parroo app.
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Fontainebleau Castle
Napoleon stood in the Courtyard of the White Horse on 20 April 1814 to bid farewell to his Imperial Guard before exile on Elba, an event so charged it renamed the courtyard the 'Cour des Adieux.' Originally a 12th-century hunting lodge, Francis I rebuilt it from 1528 into a Renaissance palace covering 63,500 square metres with over 1,500 rooms.
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Vaux-le-Vicomte Castle
Nicolas Fouquet threw a fête so lavish for Louis XIV in 1661 that the king had him arrested weeks later, and the same trio he hired (Le Vau, Le Brun, Le Nôtre) went straight to work on Versailles. Built between 1658 and 1661, this baroque château was the first project where architecture, painting, and landscape design were conceived as a single unified whole.
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Fontainebleau State Forest
The sandstone formations here are the remains of a seabed from 34 million years ago, and the boulder fields they produced became the training ground that effectively invented modern rock climbing. Spanning 25,000 hectares and designated a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, the forest also inspired the Barbizon painters and attracts around 11 million visitors a year.
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Barbizon
What is now a quiet village street was, in the 1830s and 1840s, a proving ground for a new idea: that ordinary landscapes and rural labourers were worth painting seriously. Millet, Rousseau, and Corot settled here, painting outdoors in the forest, and their work set the course for Impressionism.
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Imperial Theatre (Fontainebleau Castle)
So few performances were staged here during Napoleon III's reign that the horseshoe-shaped auditorium, with its yellow silk upholstery and Bohemian crystal chandelier, survived virtually intact. Designed by Hector Lefuel between 1853 and 1856 in Neo-Louis XVI style, it was restored after a 10-million-euro gift from Abu Dhabi and reopened in 2014.
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Château de By: Rosa Bonheur Workshop Museum
Rosa Bonheur kept lions, bears, and a pet doe in the grounds of this estate so she could study them for her paintings, and she was the first woman to receive the Légion d'honneur, awarded by Empress Eugénie in 1865. Purchased in 1859, the château in Thomery served as her home and studio for 40 years and is now a museum dedicated to her work.
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Fontainebleau Synagogue
The original synagogue, funded through a raffle organised by Baroness Rothschild and inaugurated in 1857, was destroyed by fire in April 1941 by French collaborators who were never identified. The rebuilt synagogue, consecrated in 1965, stands steps from the palace and carries a memorial to the Jewish community members deported during the occupation.
Good to know
- How many places does Parroo cover in Fontainebleau?
- 23 researched places, from the Château de Fontainebleau and Vaux-le-Vicomte Castle to lesser-known spots like the Château de By Rosa Bonheur Workshop Museum. Each one has a short summary, a full article, and a ~3-minute audio story.
- Is there an audio guide?
- Yes. Every place has a ~3-minute audio story, written from the perspective of a guide standing next to you and produced with premium narration, not the article read aloud.
- Which languages is Fontainebleau available in?
- German, English, and French. Pick whichever you'd rather read or listen in.
- Do I need to book anything or be online?
- No booking, no signup. It's a self-guided walk you start whenever you like. You do need a connection for now to stream the audio and load articles; offline support is something we're still building.
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Updated: 2026-05-29