Cité de Carcassonne

Cité de Carcassonne

A city of towers

Rising on a hill in the south of France, the Cité de Carcassonne looks like a castle from a dream: a whole walled town crowned with more than fifty pointed towers, ringed not by one wall but by two, one inside the other. When its banners fly and its turrets catch the sunset, it is hard to believe such a place is real. It is one of the largest and most complete fortified cities in all of Europe.

Two thousand years of defences

People have fortified this hill for a very long time. The Romans built walls here, and parts of their work still survive at the base of the defences. Over the centuries that followed, rulers kept adding to and strengthening the fortifications, until by the Middle Ages Carcassonne had become an almost unconquerable stronghold guarding the route between the Mediterranean and the rest of France.

The double ring of walls was the cleverest part of its defence. If attackers fought their way past the outer wall, they found themselves trapped in the open space between the two walls — the "lists" — where the defenders on the higher inner wall could rain arrows down on them.

The Cathars and the crusade

Carcassonne's most dramatic age came in the early 1200s. The region around it was home to the Cathars, people whose religious beliefs were considered heresy by the Catholic Church. The Pope and the king launched a war against them, the Albigensian Crusade, and great armies marched south.

In 1209 the crusaders besieged Carcassonne. The young lord of the city, Viscount Trencavel, defended it bravely, but the summer heat cut off the water supply, and the city was forced to surrender. The Cathar lands were taken, and Carcassonne passed into the hands of the French crown, which made it a key royal fortress on the frontier with the kingdom of Aragon.

Saved from destruction

As the centuries passed and France's borders shifted, Carcassonne lost its military importance. By the 1800s the great walls had fallen into a sad ruin, and the French government even ordered that they be pulled down.

But local people, led by a passionate scholar, fought to save the cité. The famous architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc was brought in to restore the walls and towers, giving many of them their pointed, witch's-hat roofs. Thanks to this rescue, Carcassonne survives today as one of the wonders of France, protected by UNESCO.

A living town

Carcassonne is not an empty monument: people still live and work inside its walls, in narrow streets lined with houses, shops and an ancient church. Each summer the cité comes alive with festivals, fireworks and medieval re-enactments that fill the towers and ramparts with colour.

Visiting today

Visitors can wander the streets of the cité, walk between the famous double walls, and climb the ramparts for sweeping views over the surrounding countryside and the newer town below. With its fifty towers, its double defences and its dramatic history of crusades and sieges, Carcassonne is the very picture of a medieval fortress-city — a giant of stone come straight out of a fairy tale.