Carcassonne is a very special medieval town up on a hill in southwest France, with a castle
and a fortified double wall going all the way around it.
There's a tall inner wall, and a lower outer wall providing two layers of protection for
the old medieval city.
This illustration from Google Earth gives you a very clear idea of how these two walls
were situated, with the big towers providing the defenders fortified positions to fire
at the attackers.
We are going to take you on a walk along the entire length of those walls in the old fortified
town of Carcassonne.
Another Google Earth view provides that perspective, showing how the wall goes around the entire
old town, and a photograph from the Tourist Information Office shows the many buildings
that are within the walls.
As you walk along on top of the wall you also get nice views looking out at the city beyond
and some beautiful landscapes of vineyards, olive groves and green rolling hills.
We're going to start our walk around the walls at one of the few openings in the massive
defensive wall.
You'll see this complicated entrance solved the problem of how do you get through a wall
while keeping the attackers out.
The main gate leading into Carcassonne is the Narbonne gate.it is a fortified gate with
the barbican reaching out from the wall to help defend the gate, because the gate would
be a very vulnerable part of the old, fortified city.
That's where the invaders would try to break down the door, and get in.
But with this Narbonne gate, you've got the walls and the battlements, and it's a really
protected spot.
Carcassonne gets extremely busy with tourists.
During the day there are no cars allowed inside the fortified town.
But in the morning, it's time for the delivery vehicles and the service vehicles, and they
come driving in.
It's almost like rush hour, a parade of traffic, about 9 o'clock in the morning.
Big trucks come through.
This gate is such an elaborate example of medieval fortified architecture that we will
come back and have another look at it later in the walk, which will take us full circle
around the town and return to this same place.
Within the walls, we have an actual functioning town, with shops, there are several small
hotels, and there's 50 homes for the local residents as well, with a small plaza in the
center hosting some outdoor terrace restaurants, and a vast pedestrian zone that you want to
explore, which we've shown you in other movies about Carcassonne.
But in this program, we are focusing on the castle and the wall.
Before entering the castle, enjoy the view from the terrace and notice those wooden extensions
from the top of the wall.
They enabled defenders to drop rocks, burning oil and shoot arrows at any attackers trying
to get up the walls.
This was the first castle to use such wooden platforms.
The castle is a fortress inside the walled fortress, with a dry moat around it, crossed
by a stone bridge leading to the entrance.
The front gate is surrounded by a semicircular barbican wall providing more defense.
Another Google Earth view shows the overall castle shape with its central courtyards and
fortified walls and towers.
This castle was first built from the early 12th-century, but the fortifications have
a much longer history that I'll be explaining during the program as we walk around the wall.
Once you've pay the small admission fee you're welcome to enjoy the various courtyards and
also enter inside the castle where they have a historical museum.
We'll see more of the museum at the end of the show, but now we want to get moving and
start the walk along the castle wall, which is included in the admission fee for the castle.
There cannot be very many places in the world that produce so profound an effect upon the
imagination, and the sense of beauty and history as the old walled town of Carcassonne, especially
when you are walking along its wall, stepping back into the 13th century, when this town
was attacked by the Pope from Rome.
More about that crazy story coming up a bit later.
Looking down from the wall outside the fortress we see a community of homes.
There's a church and a strange structure in the middle, it's with two parallel walls going
down the hill so I walked down below to have a look.
They had a fortified walkway that came down from the old town, you see here with the walls
on both sides of it.
That enabled them to walk down to the river and get some more water and be protected at
the same time from any sort of attack, any ambush that might spring up course.
Of course, they had a water supply up in the town, but more often they would also come
down to the river to get even more water.
You can't really walk up there nowadays, it's a dead-end, doesn't go anywhere, but it's
nice to look at it from down below.
Okay, we're back up on the wall continuing our walk, looking inside the old, fortified
town at some of the gardens, and courtyards, and lovely buildings including a deluxe hotel,
the Hotel de la Cite.
Perhaps you've been wondering, why did the Pope attack this castle in the early 13th
century?
It was occupied by Christian so what was the problem?
Carcassonne became famous for its role in the Albigensian Crusades where the city was
a stronghold of a Christian religious sect called the Cathars.
They were considered heretics by the church in Rome.
Cathars were opposed to the Roman church and had their own sacraments and bishops and did
not believe that Jesus was sent to bring redemption to the human race.
These Cathars beliefs were not acceptable to the church and so Pope Innocent the Third
recalled his Crusaders from the Holy Land to go and fight against his own kindred in
the year 1209.
The pope’s invasion was led by a cruel and remorseless Simon de Montfort, who is the
only attacker who ever conquered Carcassonne.
He flooded this fair region with blood.
Heretics at home were considered more dangerous than infidels abroad…a familiar refrain
of tyrants, it sounds familiar today.
The crusading army forced the citizens to surrender and leave their city.
The former Cathar leader of the city, Raimond Trencavel, was forced into exile and rallied
his troops to stage a counterattack to retake his city, which failed.
He was defeated, captured, thrown in the dungeon, where he later died in the basement of his
own castle.
The victorious French King Louis IX and his successor Philip the Bold took full control
of the castle in the name of the Pope, and by the mid-13th century they built the second
wall, the outer rampart which made the fortress impregnable, and the castle never suffered
another defeat in battle from that time on.
Carcassonne is such an important historic landmark that the castle and entire wall town
are on the UNESCO list of World Heritage Sites.
Historical pageants are occasionally presented at this outdoor theater during the high season.
No one is quite sure when people first arrived at this location, but the first signs of settlement
in this region have been archaeologically dated to about 3500 BC, and the hill became
an important trading place in the sixth century BC on this rocky spur overlooking the valley
of the Aude River, and the ancient routes linking the Atlantic with the Mediterranean,
and the Iberian Peninsula – a very strategic location.
I'll tell you about the ancient Roman occupation and other events in a few minutes.
At this section of the wall, we have a good view of the church of the old town.
It's the Basilica of St Nazaire.
Originally this was a cathedral back in the 10th and 11th centuries.
It was built in a Romanesque and Gothic style, as we have shown in our other Carcassonne
videos.
But for now, we're getting back out on the wall to continue walking.
You can see the church location in that white circle in another Google view that shows you
the route that we're taking now between the high inner wall and shorter outer wall.
Perhaps you've noticed, there have been some staircases along this wall, but really it's
not too strenuous.
Anybody can take this walk.
It's just a total of the three kilometers.
You can easily do it in under an hour, relaxing and enjoying the views.
Most of it is quite level.
This section of the wall is open to the public at no charge.
It's all free.
And it is a fascinating stretch of wall because we're walking on that lower outer wall, just
in front of the high bastion, and in between is the open area they called the list, which
was also part of the defensive fortifications, sometimes used for storage of their weapons.
And during times of peace, they would hold jousting tournaments here, with knights on
horseback and lances trying to knock each other down.
It was the days of chivalry.
Both sets of walls underwent reconstruction during the final phase of building in the
late 13th century, with more towers added and enlarged.
Another view of that same section from outside the lower wall standing in what would have
been a dry moat, for one more ring of protection.
We've now come full circle in our wall walk around most of the tow, n returning to where
we began at the Narbonne Gate, which is such an amazing medieval structure that it's worth
taking a close second look.
You can see a side view of the Narbonne Gate with the fortified barbican coming out and
that's actually protecting a drawbridge that can be raised to further strengthen the defenses,
and then the big tower up behind it, so that the bowmen can be shooting down on the enemies.
And there's trapdoors that can drop boiling oil, and rocks and boulders onto people trying
to attack.
They can close the gates, dropping a portcullis, and trap the invaders inside into a shooting
gallery, and really defend this castle.
That does complete the main segment of this walk around the walls of Carcassonne, and
from here you can head back through the Narbonne Gate, up the main little shopping lane of
town.
It will lead you back to the castle, but there is one more part of the wall that you can
visit.
Let's recap on the map.
So far, the route that we've taken from the Narbonne Gate to the castle and out the back
door along the first section of wall, and then around the bend over by the theater and
the church, continuing between the two big walls along the list, and then ending up back
at the Narbonne Gate.
Well now we're going to continue around this final section, where we are going to see some
evidence of the early Roman wall.
Once again we have an outer wall, and then a clear space, and a higher inner wall, with
an interesting gate leading inside the old town.
It's a medieval feature which is believed to be where the ancient Roman gate was also
located, as seen here from inside the wall.
These big walls are from the medieval period, but they are built on a foundation of earlier
Roman walls that date back to the third and fourth centuries, as proven by that unique
Roman technique of using bri in construction of their stone walls.
The medieval builders inserted foundations underneath the Roman wall to stabilize them
as you see in the circle.
The original Roman walls were three meters thick can 6 to 8 meters, characteristic of
the late Roman style with rubble cores faced with stone and bricks on a concrete foundation.
This route brings us around to the north end of the walls where we get some nice views
looking out across the rest of Carcassonne.
The city has a population of about 50,000, nearly all of them living outside the walls.
We are approaching the end of this part of the walk as we arrive back at the castle.
We're walking through some foundations and arches that used to hold up one of the banquet
rooms of the castle.
It's a heavy medieval kind of Gothic architecture with those pointed arches.
One branch of the path now goes down the hill, so let's have a look from below back at the
castle.
It is a classic viewpoint, but back in 2018, something unusual happened – it's a modern
art installation by the Swiss artist Ticino Felice Varin, called "eccentric concentric
circles."
It's gone now.
We still have our ticket for the castle, which allows us to go back inside again, because
now we want to take you into the historical museum.
It's a relatively small museum with five main galleries, so it's quite easy to walk through
and enjoy different time periods, extending from the ancient Roman up into the Gothic
period.
As part of your admission to the castle you're free to walk through the museum, and it's
like being back in the Middle Ages.
You walk from one room to the next, and these were the actual living spaces back in the
14th century, 15th century, when this was home to the Lord of the Manor.
They've got a wonderful exhibit with a series of Gothic fragments of architecture.
They've got some statues, and they have the original wall interiors and ceilings.
It's just an astonishing place.
Europe has many great castles, and certainly the castle of Carcassonne ranks right up there
at the top with the best of them.
This is really a medieval experience that makes it well worth your trip to come down
to the city of Carcassonne and spend some time touring through the old town, and especially
entering into the castle.
Here's a rapid-fire history of Carcassonne.
Fasten your safety belts.
People have lived in this area for thousands of years.
The Romans arrived in the first century BC and established a city.
They built a wall around it and fortifications and palaces.
The Roman Empire fell, the Visigoths took over; the French came in; the Muslims invaded,
but stayed just for a few decades.
A thousand years ago the Trencavel viscount dynasty gained control and stayed for two
centuries.
They were displaced by the French, under King Louis IX around the year 1200, and from that
point on it was all France, all the time.
By 1700, Carcassonne lost its strategic position guarding the border with Spain, which was
moved further south.
Their main industry became manufacture of textiles, which later failed after competition
from abroad, and the place began to decline.
People moved out.
The buildings began to fall down.
The French government decided to demolish the whole thing in the mid-19th century, but
the people reacted, a conservation movement grew, and it was rescued, renovated, and rebuilt.
Tourists began to arrive and enjoy it early in the 20th century, and since then, its popularity
has constantly grown, with currently over 2 million visitors in the average year, the
second-most popular historic monument in France, after Mont St Michel, becoming one of the
world's great historic sites.
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