France: Occitanie – Carcassonne

🏰 Carcassonne — France’s Most Gloriously Bonkers Fortress

We’d heard about Carcassonne before we got there, of course. Everyone has. It’s one of those places that appears on the cover of every “Best of France” travel book ever printed, usually photographed at sunset with a helpful haze of romantic mist softening its silhouette. What we hadn’t quite prepared ourselves for was just how utterly, preposterously, magnificently over the top it actually is in person.

Carcassonne sits on a hilltop in the Languedoc region of southern France, about halfway between Toulouse and the Mediterranean coast, and it’s been sitting there — in one form or another — for an extraordinarily long time. The first serious fortifications were put up during the Gallo-Roman period, somewhere around the 3rd and 4th centuries AD, when the Romans decided this particular hill was rather useful for keeping an eye on things. The Visigoths then moved in after the Roman Empire lost interest in keeping everything together, followed eventually by the Franks. Then the whole thing got properly complicated during the Cathar period of the 12th and 13th centuries, when the town became a significant stronghold during the brutal Albigensian Crusade — a particularly nasty episode in which the Catholic Church set about eliminating the Cathar heresy from the region with considerable enthusiasm and very little mercy.

The big building surge happened in the 13th and 14th centuries, largely under the direction of the French Crown — particularly Louis IX (Saint Louis) and his son Philip III — who transformed Carcassonne into one of the most formidable military fortresses in medieval Europe. They clearly weren’t the sort of people who did things by halves. The result is a citadel known as La Cité: a double ring of enormous concentric walls, a moat running around the outside, heavy barbicans guarding the main gates, portcullises, drawbridges, and no fewer than 53 towers. Fifty-three. We counted. Well, we didn’t actually count, but we thought about counting, which is close enough.

Standing outside and looking up at it for the first time, it felt less like a medieval fortress and more like someone had commissioned a set designer to build the most dramatic castle imaginable, with an unlimited budget and absolutely no one to tell them to calm down. Which, in a sense, is exactly what happened — though it was a 19th-century architect named Eugène Viollet-le-Duc who gets much of the credit (or blame, depending on your architectural sensibilities) for the dramatic restoration that began in 1853. The place had been falling to bits for centuries, and Viollet-le-Duc, who also restored Notre-Dame de Paris, swept in and put it all back together — somewhat controversially, as it turned out. More on that in a moment.

Perched inside all this theatrical stonework is a 12th-century castle called Château Comtal, built by the Trencavel family — the local viscounts who ran Carcassonne before the French Crown eventually took over following the Albigensian Crusade. There’s also a beautiful Romanesque basilica, the Basilique Saint-Nazaire, which dates from the 11th century and contains some genuinely lovely Gothic stained glass that survived the centuries rather better than the building’s exterior. And surrounding all of this is a small, functioning village — streets, houses, the lot — all contained within these absurd fairy-tale walls.

The views from up here are, it must be said, rather spectacular. To the west stretches the modern city of Carcassonne, which exists in pleasant contrast to its ancient neighbour. To the north, you can make out the gleam of the River Aude and, on a good day, the Canal du Midi — the remarkable 17th-century waterway that connects the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, completed in 1681 under the direction of Pierre-Paul Riquet, and now a UNESCO World Heritage Site in its own right. And to the south, on a clear day, the Pyrénées loom magnificently on the horizon, their peaks still carrying a dusting of snow well into spring.

All of this medieval grandeur has made Carcassonne France’s second most visited tourist attraction, after the Eiffel Tower. Which tells you everything you need to know about what you’re going to encounter when you actually get there. We were herded — there’s really no other word for it — along with what appeared to be the entire populations of Germany, Japan, and several large American states, all clutching cameras and shuffling along the narrow streets of La Cité in a manner that suggested a particularly well-dressed migration of some kind.

We were, however, genuinely lucky. During our visit, a medieval festival was taking place within the walls — jousting, period costumes, musicians, falconry — which gave the whole thing an atmospheric charge that the usual tourist shuffle rather lacks. It was, briefly, possible to squint and imagine yourself back in the 13th century, at least until someone’s iPhone went off.

Now, a few words of honest warning, because this is France and the French are not always entirely focused on the visitor experience.

Viollet-le-Duc’s 19th-century restoration, impressive as it is in scale, has attracted considerable criticism from architectural historians over the years. He was accused — probably fairly — of taking considerable liberties with historical accuracy. Some of the conical slate-tiled roofs on the towers, for instance, are thought to be entirely his own invention rather than anything that was actually there in the medieval period. So parts of what you’re looking at are, strictly speaking, a 19th-century Frenchman’s idea of what a medieval fortress should look like. It’s still remarkable, but it’s worth knowing.

More immediately irritating, the interior of La Cité has been almost entirely surrendered to commerce of the least charming kind. The streets are lined with shops selling plastic knights, dubious nougat of uncertain provenance, and quantities of lavender-scented merchandise that bear no obvious relationship to anything historically connected with Carcassonne. The restaurants are overpriced, the menus are uninspiring, and the whole thing has the slightly exhausted atmosphere of a place that’s been loved rather too hard for rather too long. Our advice — which we offer freely and without any expectation that you’ll take it — is to do your sightseeing first, then retreat to the lower town (the Ville Basse) for lunch. You’ll eat better, pay less, and feel considerably less like you’ve been processed through a tourist machine.

Entry to the citadel itself, incidentally, is free — you can walk around the outer areas and soak up the atmosphere at no cost whatsoever, which, given how much everything else costs in France these days, felt like something of a minor miracle. However, if you want to explore the Château Comtal properly, you’ll need to pay the admission fee, which covers rather a lot.

Your ticket gets you privileged access to the upper ramparts — from where the 360-degree panoramic views over the surrounding countryside are, frankly, worth the money on their own. You also get the full rampart walk with access to the wall passages known as the “hoards” — covered wooden galleries that once allowed defenders to drop unpleasant things on attackers below. There’s a visit to the dungeon (the donjon, as the French rather grandly call it), access to the castle’s rooms and interior courtyards, a short film and a detailed architectural model of Carcassonne that helps make sense of the whole complex layout, and finally a visit to the Musée Lapidaire, which contains an extensive collection of medieval stonework and sculptures recovered from across the site.

It is, despite everything — the crowds, the tat shops, the questionable nougat — an extraordinary place. Carcassonne is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and when you’re standing on the ramparts in the early morning light before the coaches arrive, looking out over the rooftops toward the Pyrénées, it’s genuinely not difficult to understand why. Medieval Europe produced a great deal of remarkable architecture, but it rarely produced anything quite this dramatic, this complete, or this shamelessly cinematic.

Go. Just eat somewhere else.