The Cathar chateauxs. We chose Carcasonne, a fully restored and functioning walled city and castle, which I’d highly recommend anyone to go and see, and the ruins of Peyrepertuse and Queribus, both on the D14 near Perpignan. There are plenty of ruined chateauxs to choose from, but these last two in particular are built in places you’d never think it was possible to build a small shack yet alone a huge castle.
A map of Carcassone
Inside the first wall.
This place is huge! There is a tiny turquoise blob at the top of some steps in the bottom right corner of the picture. It’s a person, which gives some idea of the scale of the building.
The main gates to the second wall.
Inside the city. It’s all tourist shops and hotels obviously, but wasn’t too busy mid week.
There are apartments and flats above the shops and cafes for their owners. How cool would it be to live here if it was just a normal residential place without all the tourists??
No cars, but a few bikes were coming in and out, including this deformed monstrosity.
The city has its own on-site Gothic cathedral.
I kept expecting to see the Eye of Sauron at the top.
Just to the side of the central castle gates; this is someone’s back garden.
Inside the castle. Again the people in the picture give an idea of the scale of this place.
You can do a tour of the ramparts, this is a view from them. Looking over the city to a very expensive four star hotel and the cathedral.
Looking out across the ‘new’ city of Carcassone (still hundreds of years old) from one of the castle towers.
It looks like a Disney set for a twee fairytale film, but vicious battles were fort here and hundreds of people were burned, starved and slaughtered, it’s hard to put the two together when you’re there.
A bit of history.
Onto Renne le Chateaux for some extremely nice food, can’t remember what I had but it was cooked perfectly. Also there was this tiny castle.
Got a picture of the bikes in front of it as well.
Onto Peyrepertuse, astonishing that it got built considering the tools of the day. The D14 that runs under both castles is a tiny, twisty, convoluted affair that seems to go on forever. By the time we got to the castle we were too tired and hot to walk the final distance up to the ruins.
We were also too hot to stop at Queribus, we’d run out of water and it was baking out in the sun. You can just about see it from Peyrepertuse (it’s the pointy bit in the centre of the picture).
A bit of excitement on the way back, I saw a huge streak of lightning hit a hillside between the two castles. After a drinkie stop in the next town we set off back to where we were staying and rode past the same hillside, which by then was burning really well.
Lots of fire engines were driving around, but it turns out they were on their way to a nearby village (Tuchan) that was flooding from the run-off from the storm over the mountains.