My husband and I spent three nights at the Chateau des Ducs de Joyeuse in September 2007. Finding the hotel was easy (maps for auto-route and the hotel's web site gave local directions.) The town of Couiza is very, very small, but well located for site seeing. You can very easily get onto the routes needed to journey to many locations/sites. Having gone into Carcassone and experience its traffic jams we congratulated ourselves for choosing a hotel with an easy in-and-out location.


The Chateau is impressive and even more so when you're inside its gates. Since the hotel is an old castle, there aren't any elevators to the floors. You need to plan using the original circular stone stairways in the corner turrets to get to your room. We were there during the low season, so perhaps in high season there are more staff available that could assist with the baggage. For us, we had to lug our own luggage. Our original room was on the third floor, but we felt it was too small for our three night stay and still keep a happy marriage! So we upgraded our room and stayed in the "suite" (which is one of the rooms featured on the web site). The room and modern bathroom were very large and comfortable. (Note the first room would have been fine if we were staying one night. The bathroom was small and had little counter space,)

Again, the town is very small (I believe there was one restaurant), so I would strongly recommend to dine at the hotel's wonderful restaurant. We took advantage of the room/meal plan. This plan includes breakfast and dinner, however the dinner menu is a set menu, but the staff did accommodate some substitutions. The food was inventive, nicely prepared and delicious. The dinning staff were attentive and friendly. I should mention that few staff members spoke English - and I am not expecting that they do, after all I am limited with my french! (We actually found this area in France as a whole to be more limited with spoken english.) So I would caution people not to confuse a language barrier as unfriendly. Again, our experience was the hotel had friendly, helpful staff.

The breakfast selection ranges from breads to meats and cheeses. The server constantly refreshed juices, coffee and food. A great way to start the day.

We didn't use the pool because of the time of year.

Overall I would recommend the hotel for its charm and usual accommodations, value with meal plan, and location, location, location.