Castel Sainte-Claire

Castel Sainte-Claire is a villa in the hills above Hyeres, in the Var department of France, built on the site of a seventeenth century convent whose twelfth century city walls survive in ruin on the grounds. The French naval officer Olivier Voutier, who had acquired the Venus de Milo sculpture from Greece in 1820, rebuilt the site as a villa that same year, and the American author Edith Wharton later redesigned it in 1927, filling the grounds with cacti and other sub-tropical plants to create a garden now recognized as one of the Remarkable Gardens of France. The city of Hyeres bought the property in 1955 and turned the grounds into a public garden, and since 1990 the villa itself has served as the administrative office of the National Park of Port-Cros and the Botanical Preserve of Porquerolles.