Summer is supposed to be the season for everyone else. Kids get camp. Families get vacations. The itinerary fills up with other people’s needs, other people’s excitement, other people’s towels on the bathroom floor. And somewhere in the middle of all that generous, self-erasing logistics management, there is you, standing next to the carry-on you packed for a trip you didn’t plan, thinking: shouldn’t there be something that’s just mine?
It turns out more than 300 women had exactly that thought at exactly the same time, and instead of filing it away next to the other good ideas they never got around to, they did something about it. They pooled their money, bought a medieval château in the south of France, renovated it, and turned it into an all-inclusive adult summer camp, for women, by women, in a castle that is nearly 800 years old. Which is, to be clear, extremely on brand for a group of women who decided that if the world wasn’t going to hand them what they needed, they’d just go ahead and purchase a 13th-century French fortress instead.
The camp is called Camp Château, and it is operating exactly as described. This is not a fantasy. Reservations are open.
The “What If” That Actually Worked
The story starts, as so many good ones do, with three women browsing the internet and spiraling into possibility. Leah Lykins, her mother Philippa Girling, and Girling’s friend Lynda Coleman stumbled onto a property listing for Château de Béduer in southwestern France and felt that specific kind of recklessness that strikes when you see something beautiful that you absolutely cannot afford on your own. “We stumbled upon it and it was incredible,” Lykins, co-founder and daughter of founder Philippa Girling, told a 2025 PEOPLE report, recalling how they first discovered the property during a casual online search. The building was enough to spark curiosity even before the idea fully took shape. “We were just a little intoxicated by the building,” Lykins said. “We were really trying to figure out an excuse to get it.”
The excuse they found was elegant in its simplicity: don’t buy it alone. Instead of relying on traditional investors, the founders opened the opportunity to other women. The result was a co-ownership model that brought together more than 300 women to fund the project entirely. In total, they raised roughly $2.3 million to purchase the château and an additional $325,000 to renovate it and add safety upgrades. At roughly $7,700 per person, each of those women bought herself a stake in something that most people keep in the “someday” folder forever. The someday folder is famously bottomless. These women emptied it.
Their stated vision, as Lykins described it, was to create a place where women and people who identify as women could simply be. Not perform, not manage, not coordinate. Just be, preferably in a medieval hall with a glass of regional wine and nowhere to be until morning.
What the Camp Actually Looks Like
Camp Château takes place at Château de Béduer in southwest France, in the picturesque and historic Quercy region, one of the last remaining unspoiled areas of France. The majestic château sits high on a hill overlooking the Lot Valley and the River Célé, offering stunning views of the surrounding countryside and farmland so underdeveloped that you feel transported to a different moment in time. According to Vacationer Magazine, the keep dates back to 1204, and the main building, with its two-meter-thick outer walls, displays clear medieval origins, with La Grande Salle featuring a 15th-century chimney, a 17th-century painted ceiling, and a huge 19th-century Venetian chandelier. Whatever you are carrying into that building, the building has absorbed heavier things.
Each stay runs six days and five nights, fully all-inclusive, covering accommodations, meals, snacks, beverages, wine, three or more daily electives, two or more excursions, a market day, and a free shuttle. The activities menu is not a spa brochure’s idea of what women want. Each full day, campers choose from instructed activities across culture, nature, culinary, fitness, and art – options including hiking, jam-making, flower crowns, candle-making, jewelry, photography, painting, wine and cheese tasting, cooking, French language lessons, horseback riding, kayaking, yoga, and dance, plus outdoor pools and plenty of space with hammocks, chess, badminton, and croquet. You can do all of that, or none of it. The philosophy is genuinely choose-your-own-adventure, which is either incredibly liberating or the thing that makes a certain type of person stand frozen at a buffet for ten minutes.
Evenings close with an aperitif hour, a three- or four-course French country dinner made by local chefs using regional ingredients, and optional night activities ranging from stargazing to sewing the day’s badges onto what the camp calls a “Châtote,” old records playing somewhere in the background. The detail about the records matters. It signals that someone thought carefully about the feeling they wanted to create, not just the schedule.
A Second Château for Good Measure
By 2025, demand had outpaced a single location, so the founders added a second property. Their more recently acquired location, the L’Abbaye-Château de Camon, sits “atop one of France’s official plus beaux villages” and carries nearly a thousand years of its own history, according to Globetrender. In 2025, Camp Château had 1,000 spots and one château. For 2026, they have 1,850 spots and two châteaux. The speed of that expansion is worth pausing on. This is not a retreat that quietly filled a few dozen spots. It is a retreat that is outgrowing itself, which means that the thing these women created is resonating with other women in a way that goes beyond novelty. Women are not coming for the Instagram photos, though the photos are obviously extraordinary. They are coming for something harder to name.
Women reclaiming time and space for themselves has become a cultural conversation for good reason, and what Camp Château has built is one of the most literal versions of that impulse that exists anywhere in the world.
What Women Actually Say About It
The testimonial that stops you cold doesn’t come from a woman in her thirties on a girls’ trip. According to a 2024 Business Insider piece, traveler Victoria Goyet attended the camp at age 75 and described it as life-changing, saying: “attending camp made me stop, re-center, and think about my life and what I want to do. I don’t know how many years I have left, but I’m closer to the end than the beginning. Camp made it clear to me that it’s important I start making time for things I want to do.”
That is not the sound of someone who tried a new hobby. That is the sound of a person who got permission, at 75, to put herself on her own list. And the fact that it took a trip to a medieval French castle to get there is both absurd and completely understandable – sometimes the ordinary architecture of your daily life has no room for a revelation of that size. Sometimes you need different walls.
The Online Version, for Everyone Who Can’t Make It to France
Not everyone can travel to France, which led the founders to expand the idea beyond the château itself. They created Pocket Château, a digital membership community designed to replicate the same atmosphere online. Pocket Château is accessible via mobile app for €15 monthly, offering online workshops, community chat, and virtual events. Lykins described the experience as “slow internet” – “slow, ad free, spam free… a non-pressurized environment.” Over 500 Pocket Campers from 20 countries around the world, from their twenties to their seventies, have joined since the community opened its doors.
The fact that hundreds of women across 20 countries signed up for a paid online community built around intentional slowness – in an era where every platform competes for your anxiety – says something about how hungry people are for a different kind of digital experience. The internet does not have to feel like a grocery store someone set on fire. Pocket Château is apparently evidence of that.
What This Is Really About
There is a version of this story you could tell as an investment piece. Three hundred women bought a depreciating asset in a foreign country, somehow avoided every pitfall that typically accompanies that sentence, and turned it into a business that more than doubled its capacity in two years. That is genuinely impressive. It is also not the point.
The point is what Victoria Goyet said, about finally making time for herself at 75. The point is that the demand for this thing keeps growing, and the demand is not really for France or wine or kayaking, though all of those are welcome. The demand is for a room that was built with you in mind. A week where nobody needs anything from you. A space where the only schedule you’re managing is your own.
Most women are very good at identifying what other people need and doing something about it. Most women are considerably less practiced at doing that for themselves. It takes, apparently, a co-owned medieval fortress and a deliberately constructed adult summer camp to make the opportunity feel real enough to take. Which is a little funny, and also not funny at all. Both of those things are allowed to be true. Camp Château has grown from 240 spots in 2023 to 1,850 planned for 2026, with more than 2,100 expected in 2027. That growth is not a marketing story. It is a record of how many women looked at a six-day trip to a French château, calculated the cost, and decided it was worth it to finally be somewhere that was entirely, uncomplicatedly for them.
AI Disclaimer: This article was created with the assistance of AI tools and reviewed by a human editor.