The Château de Pau began as a fortified site above the Gave de Pau, controlling a crossing and the surrounding territory of Béarn. Medieval viscounts developed the castle from the twelfth century, and the surviving brick keep is associated with Gaston Fébus, the powerful fourteenth-century ruler who strengthened a network of Pyrenean fortresses. Walls, towers, courts, and residential buildings expressed both defense and princely government. The name Pau is often linked by tradition to the palisade around the early stronghold, although the precise origin remains debated.

During the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the rulers of Navarre transformed the fortress into a Renaissance residence. Henri d’Albret and Marguerite of Angoulême gathered a court known for literary and religious interests. Their daughter Jeanne d’Albret gave birth there in 1553 to the future Henry IV of France. Later tradition celebrated a large turtle shell as his cradle and made his childhood central to the château’s identity. Henry’s birth is securely connected with Pau, but many intimate stories attached to the room and objects developed through later royal memory.

When Henry became king of France, Béarn and Navarre entered a new relationship with the French Crown, and the château’s role as an independent princely court diminished. It served governors, officials, military needs, and occasional royal visitors while undergoing alteration and periods of neglect. The French Revolution removed or dispersed furnishings and converted spaces to administrative or military use. Interest in Henry IV nevertheless survived political change because different regimes could present him as a founder of unity, a tolerant monarch, or a reassuring national ancestor.

In the nineteenth century Louis-Philippe and later Napoleon III sponsored extensive restoration. Architects repaired façades, recreated interiors, and furnished apartments with tapestries, furniture, sculpture, and decorative arts intended to evoke the Renaissance and Henry IV. These campaigns saved the building but also produced much of the appearance encountered today. Restoration was interpretive rather than a simple recovery of untouched rooms: designers combined surviving masonry, historical study, royal taste, and newly acquired collections to create a national monument suited to ceremony and public education.

The château now operates as a national museum with guided, ticketed access to principal interiors. Its collections include major tapestry ensembles and objects relating to Henry IV, while the architecture retains medieval, Renaissance, and nineteenth-century layers. Visitors should not assume that every state room preserves the arrangement of 1553 or that the displayed cradle remained continuously in place. The site’s history is one of repeated political reinvention: fortress, Navarrese court, royal birthplace, government property, restored dynastic memorial, and public museum overlooking a city that grew around its commanding position.