The Cité de Carcassonne is the largest fortified town in Europe to survive with a complete double wall: about 3 km of ramparts and 52 towers on a spur above the river Aude, on the old road between the Mediterranean and Toulouse. Parts of the inner wall are Gallo-Roman (late third to fourth century, recognisable by their brick courses and rounded towers); the rest was raised by the Trencavel viscounts in the twelfth century and then rebuilt by the French crown in the thirteenth.
In 1209 the Albigensian Crusade arrived. The Cité, sheltering Cathar sympathisers under the young viscount Raymond-Roger Trencavel, surrendered after a two-week siege when its water ran short; Trencavel died in his own dungeon and Simon de Montfort took his lands. A failed attempt by Trencavel’s son to retake the city in 1240 led Louis IX to expel the inhabitants, found the grid-planned Bastide Saint-Louis on the far bank of the Aude in 1247 and, with his son Philip III, build the outer wall and rebuild the inner one. The result was the concentric fortress that the Black Prince’s army could not touch when it burned the lower town in 1355.
Inside the walls stand the Château Comtal (begun around 1130, with its own moat and barbican), the basilica of Saint-Nazaire with its Romanesque nave and Gothic choir, and a small town that housed several thousand people in the Middle Ages. After the Treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659 moved the frontier south the Cité lost its purpose and decayed into a poor quarter quarried for stone; it was saved from demolition in the 1840s and restored from 1853 by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, whose pointed slate roofs on the towers remain controversial but define the silhouette.
The fortified city was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1997 and draws several million visitors a year. The ramparts and castle are run by the Centre des monuments nationaux and are ticketed, while the streets and the lices between the two walls are free. Local lore names the town after Dame Carcas, who supposedly tricked Charlemagne’s besiegers by throwing a well-fed pig over the wall; the 14 July fireworks, first staged in 1898, and the summer tournament in the lices are the modern set pieces.
