Carcassonne Castle: History of the Cité & Château Comtal

By StoneKeep Atlas Published June 22, 2026 Last updated November 5, 2026 Editorial standards

When people picture a medieval fortress, they are often picturing Carcassonne without knowing it: a double ring of honey-colored walls, dozens of round towers under pointed slate roofs, climbing a hill above a river in southern France. At its core stands the Château Comtal, the count’s castle, a stronghold within the walled city the French know simply as la Cité. The two cannot really be separated. This castle was the keep of a fortified town, and the town was the castle’s outer defense, so a visit to Carcassonne Castle is a walk through both.

Quick Facts

Quick Facts
Location	Carcassonne, Aude, Occitanie, France
Type	Fortified medieval city (la Cité) and inner castle, the Château Comtal
Built	Gallo-Roman walls 3rd–4th c.; comital castle c. 1130; outer ramparts 13th c.
Builders	Trencavel viscounts; Louis IX and Philip III the Bold; restored by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc from 1853
Condition	Restored; open to visitors
UNESCO	Historic Fortified City of Carcassonne (inscribed 1997); component of the Royal Capetian Fortresses of Languedoc (inscribed 2026)
Heritage designation	Monument historique, classé (fortifications, list of 1862); Base Mérimée PA00102588
Manager	Centre des monuments nationaux
Official website	remparts-carcassonne.fr

Carcassonne survives in unusually full medieval dress, and it does so because history made it useless. When a 17th-century treaty moved France’s border far to the south, this great frontier fortress lost its purpose, was left to rot, and very nearly came down. What stands today is both a genuine medieval citadel and a 19th-century vision of one, and much of a visit is spent telling the two apart.

Panorama of the fortified Cité de Carcassonne on its hill above the Aude — The Cité de Carcassonne crowns its hill above the Aude, a double ring of walls and towers visible for miles. Lesueur André, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Roman Walls and the Trencavel Castle

The hill above the Aude has been fortified for roughly 2,500 years. A Gaulish settlement came first, then a Roman town. In the late Empire, during the 3rd and 4th centuries, the Romans wrapped the summit in a stone wall studded with horseshoe-shaped towers. That inner ring still stands. Along much of the inner wall, the masonry a visitor sees today rests on, or reuses, Roman work, which is why Carcassonne reads as a single continuous lesson in fortification rather than the product of any one century. After Rome came the Visigoths, who held the city for some three centuries and reinforced its defenses; a brief Saracen and then Frankish presence followed before the place settled into the medieval county of Carcassonne.

The Gallo-Roman Tour de la Charpenterie on the inner wall of Carcassonne — The Tour de la Charpenterie, one of the inner wall’s Gallo-Roman towers (rounded on the field side, flat toward the city), its low tiled roof and brick courses set apart from the medieval work around it. Lynx1211, CC BY-SA 4.0.

A famous legend belongs to this early stretch, and it explains the city’s name. According to the tale, a Saracen lady called Dame Carcas held the citadel against a siege by Charlemagne. With food almost gone, she fed the last of the grain to a pig and threw it over the wall; the besiegers, concluding the city had supplies to waste, gave up and withdrew. As they left, the bells were rung in triumph, and “Carcas sonne,” Carcas rings, supposedly gave Carcassonne its name. The etymology is invented, the siege never happened, and Dame Carcas is folklore, but a stone bust of her still greets visitors at the main gate.

The reliable medieval story begins in 1067, when the viscounty passed to the Trencavel family, ambitious lords of Lower Languedoc who played the powerful counts of Toulouse and of Barcelona against each other to keep their independence. They built to match their ambitions. Work on the basilica of Saint-Nazaire began in 1096, blessed by Pope Urban II. Around 1130 the Trencavels raised a palatium, a lordly residence set directly on the old Roman rampart. Enlarged through the 12th century with a new wing and the chapel of Sainte-Marie, that palace became the Château Comtal: at once a home and a seat of power, a castle built into the wall of a city its family meant to dominate. The Cité prospered under them. Suburbs spread below the walls, the population climbed toward several thousand, and the troubadours’ songs of courtly love found a welcome at the viscounts’ court. So did something the Church found far less welcome.

The Albigensian Crusade

By the late 12th century, Languedoc had become the heartland of the Cathars, a Christian movement that rejected the Roman Church and that Rome branded as heresy. The Trencavels were not Cathars, but they tolerated their Cathar subjects, and tolerance was enough. In 1208 Pope Innocent III called for a crusade against the so-called Albigensians, named for the nearby town of Albi. This crusade was preached not against Muslims in the East but against fellow Christians in southern France.

Medieval wall painting of mounted knights in combat in the Château Comtal — A medieval wall painting of mounted combat survives inside the Château Comtal, a rare trace of the castle’s painted interiors. Tylwyth Eldar, CC BY-SA 4.0.

A crusading army marched south in the summer of 1209 under the papal legate Arnaud Amalric, abbot of Cîteaux. Béziers fell first, in July, and its people were massacred. The young viscount, Raymond-Roger Trencavel, raced back to fortify Carcassonne and crammed it with refugees. The crusaders reached the walls on August 1, 1209 and laid siege. They did not need long. On the first day of fighting, the Song of the Albigensian Crusade says, they burned the outer town up to the walls and cut the defenders off from the Aude and its water. This siege and the failed attempt to retake the Cité in 1240 are both cases in our study of how medieval castles fell.

Raymond-Roger went out to negotiate terms and did not come back, and there the story turns dark. The crusade’s chroniclers say he stayed as a hostage for the surrender; his own side said he had been seized in breach of a safe-conduct, a charge later made solemnly before a church council. He was held prisoner in his own castle. Carcassonne surrendered on August 15; its inhabitants were spared but driven out, stripped of almost everything. The viscount never left captivity. He died on November 10, 1209, a prisoner in the Château Comtal. Crusader chroniclers blamed dysentery in the foul conditions of his cell. Many at the time, and many since, suspected he had been quietly killed, and the charge that a lord had been seized under safe-conduct was long remembered as a scandal. Either way the outcome was the same. The Trencavel line was broken, and the crusade’s military commander, Simon de Montfort, took the viscounty in his place.

A Royal Frontier Fortress

Montfort died at the siege of Toulouse in 1218, and his son could not hold the conquest. The claim passed to the French crown, and in 1226 Carcassonne was absorbed into the royal domain under King Louis VIII. When the long crusade formally ended in 1229, the Château Comtal had a new master: not a viscount but a royal seneschal, the king’s officer in a freshly conquered land.

The twin-towered Porte Narbonnaise, the great eastern gate of Carcassonne, at first light — The Porte Narbonnaise, the monumental twin-towered eastern gate added under Philip III, with the bust of the legendary Dame Carcas at right. Diego Delso, CC BY-SA 4.0.

The locals were not yet trusted, and with reason. In 1240 the dispossessed Trencavel heir returned with the help of sympathetic townsfolk and tried to retake the Cité. He failed. Royal retaliation reshaped the city for good. Louis IX razed the rebels’ houses, expelled the population from the slopes, and pushed them across the Aude, where in 1247 he laid out a planned new town, the grid-patterned bastide Saint-Louis that is still Carcassonne’s working center today. With the hill cleared, the king turned the Cité into a weapon. He began a second, outer wall that doubled the Roman ring and left a broad killing ground, the lices, between the two lines of defense. The principle was concentric: an attacker who breached the outer wall found himself trapped in a narrow corridor, exposed on both sides to defenders on the higher inner rampart. There was no single decisive wall to storm, only layers. Those layers were pierced as carefully as they were laid out: Viollet-le-Duc measured the arrow slits of the Château Comtal at six centimeters on the outer face, splaying inward to a niche with a stone bench for the archer and commanding a field of thirty-five degrees.

The lices, the wide corridor between the inner and outer walls of Carcassonne — The lices: the broad killing ground between the lower outer wall and the tall inner rampart, the heart of Carcassonne’s concentric defense. Krzysztof Golik, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Louis IX’s son, Philip III the Bold, finished the work and gave it its showpiece, the monumental twin-towered Porte Narbonnaise, the great eastern gate; later modernization under Philip IV the Fair added crossbow loops and refined the defenses. The completed double enceinte ran roughly three kilometers and bristled with towers. Counts vary with what is included, but the standard figure is 52 towers; the ICOMOS evaluation behind the 1997 inscription counts 26 on the inner wall and 19 on the outer, three of them barbicans. The Château Comtal itself became a fortress within the fortress, ringed by its own moat and reached across a barbican and bridge, with a tall keep and ranges of hall and chamber where the seneschal governed. Along the wall tops ran hourds, the covered wooden galleries that let defenders drop missiles straight down onto anyone at the base of the stone; their reconstruction would later become one of the most studied features of the whole site.

All of this served a single strategic purpose. The 1258 Treaty of Corbeil fixed the border between France and the Crown of Aragon close to Carcassonne, and the Cité became the anchor of that frontier, backed by a chain of mountain strongholds, the castles of Aguilar, Termes, Peyrepertuse, Quéribus, and Puilaurens, nicknamed the “five sons of Carcassonne.” The fortress earned its reputation. During the Hundred Years’ War, in 1355, Edward the Black Prince swept through the region and burned the lower town, yet he took one look at the walled Cité and did not even attempt an assault. Contemporaries judged it impregnable, and for a long time they were right.

Redundancy and Ruin

In 1659 the frontier itself moved. The Treaty of the Pyrenees, which ended a war with Spain that had begun in 1635, handed the province of Roussillon to France and pushed the border deep into the mountains. Overnight, Carcassonne was no longer a frontier post. It was now a fortress in the interior, with no border left to guard.

The ramparts of Carcassonne photographed in 1881, towers still bare of their roofs — The ramparts in 1881. After two centuries as a forgotten frontier post, the Cité stood half wild, several towers still bare, when its long rescue was only beginning. Bibliothèque de Toulouse, no restrictions.

What followed was a slow, undramatic decline. A token garrison lingered in the château, and the count’s castle served as little more than a barracks. The city’s real life drained down the hill to the bastide, where the woolen-cloth trade made the lower town one of the busiest manufacturing centers in Languedoc. Up in the Cité, the abandoned ramparts became a quarry. Masons helped themselves to dressed stone, and the lices filled with the shacks of weavers and the poor, who lived crowded against the medieval walls in conditions that 19th-century reformers would describe with alarm. By the early 1800s the Cité was a crumbling slum that the state saw mainly as a liability, and demolition was a live possibility.

Rescue and Reinvention

That the Cité survived at all is owed first to a stubborn local scholar. From the 1830s, the Carcassonne antiquary Jean-Pierre Cros-Mayrevieille argued, lobbied, and published to convince the authorities that the decaying walls were a national treasure rather than a hazard to be cleared. His campaign won the first victory in 1840, when the old cathedral of Saint-Nazaire was classified as a historic monument. The wider fortifications would not gain full protection until 1862, but the tide had turned.

The restored Château Comtal of Carcassonne in a plate published around 1890 — The Château Comtal around 1890, its towers freshly capped with Viollet-le-Duc’s pointed roofs and a reconstructed timber gallery slung along the wall. Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, public domain.

His decisive ally was Prosper Mérimée, the writer who served as France’s inspector general of historic monuments. In 1843 Mérimée brought in a young, intensely learned architect to study Saint-Nazaire: Eugène Viollet-le-Duc. Beginning on the basilica in 1844, Viollet-le-Duc fell in love with the ruined Cité above it and spent the rest of his life on it. Work on the fortifications themselves began in 1853. Over the following decades he and his crews cleared the slum dwellings from the lices, consolidated the leaning curtain walls, and rebuilt the ravaged tops of the towers, where centuries of decay had done the most damage. He used the 13th century, the age of Saint Louis, as his reference point, and from his Carcassonne drawings he reconstructed the timber hourds that almost no other medieval fortress still showed.

A reconstructed timber hoarding gallery along a wall of the Château Comtal — A reconstructed hourd, the covered wooden gallery Viollet-le-Duc rebuilt from his Carcassonne studies, lets defenders command the foot of the wall. Inferno986return, CC BY-SA 4.0.

It is the roofs that made Carcassonne famous and Viollet-le-Duc controversial. He capped the towers with steep, pointed roofs of slate, the material and silhouette of northern France, where he had trained, rather than the low terracotta tiles of the Mediterranean south. Critics in his own day called the choice wrong for the region’s climate and traditions, and the argument over whether his Carcassonne is a faithful restoration or a romantic invention ran on into the 1960s. He never saw the work finished. Viollet-le-Duc died in 1879, and the project passed to his pupil Paul Boeswillwald and then to the architect Henri Nodet, who carried it to completion around 1911. Boeswillwald would later bring the same restorer’s eye to the Château de Foix, the comtal seat of the counts of Foix in the Ariège.

The verdict came full circle. Viollet-le-Duc had poured his theories of medieval building into his great Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture, and Carcassonne became their three-dimensional manifesto. The same restoration that drew scorn is now celebrated as a founding episode in the science of conservation, with its author counted among that discipline’s fathers. When UNESCO considered the Cité, the committee actually hesitated, deferring the nomination in 1985 in part because the monument was so heavily restored. It reconsidered, and in 1997 inscribed the Historic Fortified City of Carcassonne on the World Heritage List, citing both the medieval defenses and the restoration that saved them.

Visiting Carcassonne Castle

The Cité is free to enter and is a living quarter, with houses, shops, and the Basilica of Saint-Nazaire open to anyone who climbs the hill. The ticketed monument, run by the Centre des monuments nationaux, is the Château Comtal and the ramparts. A ticket buys the count’s castle, its bridge and barbican, the lapidary collection of carved medieval stonework, and the wall walk: the long circuit along the inner battlements, with views down into the lices and out over the bastide, the vineyards, and the distant Pyrenees.

Visitors crossing the bridge to the Château Comtal of Carcassonne — Visitors gather at the bridge and barbican of the Château Comtal, the ticketed heart of the monument. Tournasol7, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Admission

Admission
Château Comtal and ramparts	Current prices and hours
Individual ticket, April 1 to September 30	€19
Individual ticket, October 1 to March 31	€13
Under 18; EU nationals and regular non-EU residents of France aged 18 to 25	Free (proof required)
Free admission for all	First Sunday of the month from January 1 to March 31, and the European Heritage Days (third weekend of September)
Hours, April 1 to September 30	10:00-18:30, last admission 17:45
Hours, October 1 to March 31	9:30-17:00, last admission 16:15
Closed	January 1, May 1 and December 25
Booking	Places are limited; booking is strongly advised

Prices and hours as published by the Centre des monuments nationaux in November 2026. See remparts-carcassonne.fr.

How long you need

Allow two to three hours. Cobbles and rampart stairs are uneven, so sturdy shoes help, and early morning or late afternoon avoids both the crowds and the summer heat. Spring and early fall are the most comfortable seasons, and the floodlit walls after dark, seen from the Pont Vieux across the river, are worth staying for. Suitcases are not allowed in the monument, a pushchair park is provided, and photographs without flash are permitted in the château.

To sleep inside the walls, a handful of hotels occupy the Cité itself, and many more line the lower town a short walk across the bridge. You can compare options and book a stay near Carcassonne or reserve a guided tour of the Cité and the Château Comtal in advance.

Some links on this page are affiliate links, which means StoneKeep Atlas may earn a small commission, at no extra cost to you, if you book through them.

More Views of Carcassonne Castle

A closer look at the double walls, the towers, and the Château Comtal, in modern color and in archival views from a century ago.

Common Questions

Do you have to pay to enter Carcassonne Castle?

Only for the monument itself: walking the Cité’s streets costs nothing, and what the ticket buys is the castle and its ramparts. The operator’s self-guided route takes in the castle, its wall-walks and its archaeological depot, then continues as a panoramic circuit of the ramparts. That circuit has many stairs, some of them dizzying; several intermediate exits let you come down early, and the full tour brings you back to the château. Places are limited, and the operator strongly advises booking.

How long do you need at Carcassonne Castle?

About two hours for the paid part, by the operator’s own estimate for the château and ramparts, and 90 minutes to two hours for its self-guided route. Allow more for the free streets and the basilica. Guided tours run about an hour to 90 minutes. Audioguides come in several languages, with a route for young visitors. Avoid the last time slot of the day: spaces close progressively, and the operator does not guarantee access to the whole monument then.

How do you get from Carcassonne station to the castle?

By bus, the operator’s access guide points to RTCA line 3, direction Palaja, as far as the Cité médiévale stop; the network’s timetable starts that line at Chénier Gare, beside the railway station, and runs it out by way of the Pont Neuf. The operator places a bus-stop drop-off in front of the main entrance, the Porte Narbonnaise, reached over a drawbridge, with the château’s barbican about 200 meters up the cobbled main street. Drivers leave the A61 at exit 23 from Toulouse or exit 24 from the Narbonne side.

Is Carcassonne Castle wheelchair accessible?

Only in part. The operator says the barbican and the cour d’honneur are the only areas open to visitors with reduced mobility. There is no elevator up to the visitor route, which climbs steps and spiral stairs; even the timber hourds are crossed by a flight of steps. It strongly advises a companion and discourages the ramparts for anyone who tires easily. Adapted toilets and rest seats are provided, assistance dogs are admitted, and badge holders have reserved places in the Delteil car park, facing the Cité’s entrance.

Why is Carcassonne so famous?

For what it is and what was done to it. Inscribing it on the World Heritage List in 1997 under criteria (ii) and (iv), the committee called it an excellent example of a medieval fortified town whose massive defenses were built on walls dating from Late Antiquity, and of exceptional importance for Viollet-le-Duc’s restoration, which profoundly influenced later conservation principles and practice. When the Cité was first nominated in 1985, ICOMOS suggested resubmitting it together with Pierrefonds, as an eloquent example of 19th-century conservation policy and of his restoration doctrines.

Is Carcassonne a real medieval city or a reconstruction?

Both, and the ICOMOS evaluation behind its 1997 inscription weighed the mix. Viollet-le-Duc was responsible for some incorrect reconstructions, it notes, yet the substance of the walls and towers was estimated to be at least 85 percent wholly authentic, with substantial Late Roman work preserved in the lower sections. It also reports that the study of a 1462 drawing had shown unfounded the criticism that the fortifications’ general appearance, with their steeply sloping roofs, owed more to northern France than to Languedoc.

Where does the name Carcassonne come from?

Not from Dame Carcas, the operator says. Guillaume Besse wrote her legend down in 1645, in a version where Charlemagne besieged the city for five years, but the story was created in the 16th century, long after the hilltop oppidum of Carcaso, which became the Roman colony of Julia Carcaso. The figure greeting visitors at the Porte Narbonnaise drawbridge is a late 20th-century copy. Its original, inscribed Sum Carcas, is in the château’s lapidary depot; the Centre des monuments nationaux restored it in 2014.

Does anyone live in Carcassonne Castle?

The castle’s use is as a museum: ICOMOS recorded it in 1997 and noted it would be kept. France’s heritage register lists the Cité’s fortifications as State property, and the Centre des monuments nationaux runs the château and ramparts for visitors. Before the restoration the fortress still had a military role, as an arsenal and supply depot under the Ancien Régime and the Revolution; it was struck off the list of military fortresses in 1804 and reinstated in 1820. Around the castle, the Cité is still inhabited.

Beyond Carcassonne Castle

Carcassonne is the fullest survivor of a medieval art that France once practiced everywhere, and its threads run far. For the man who remade it, the natural companion is the Château de Pierrefonds in the north, the great fortress Viollet-le-Duc rebuilt for Napoleon III almost from the ground up. Set beside Carcassonne, the two define the spectrum of 19th-century medievalism, from careful consolidation to outright reconstruction.

Carcassonne also commands the fortified south. The frontier it once anchored was studded with the dramatic ruined fortresses of the Corbières, the “Five Sons of Carcassonne” that the crown rebuilt to watch the Aragonese border. Two now have full guides in our catalog: the Château de Peyrepertuse, a whole ridge turned into a stronghold; and the Château de Quéribus, on the southern crest of the Corbières, remembered as the last refuge of Cathar resistance, a label the Aude departmental tourism board says is applied à tort, wrongly. Carcassonne anchors the eight-site serial property that UNESCO inscribed on 26 July 2026 as the Royal Capetian Fortresses of Languedoc, better known as the Royal Fortresses of Languedoc, which joins the Cité and those two sons with Aguilar, Puilaurens, Termes, Lastours, and Montségur.

Carcassonne is also where the crusade began; our guide to the Cathar Castles follows that human story from here to the pyre at Montségur.

Conclusion

It is tempting to treat Carcassonne as a fairy tale, and the conical roofs invite it. The truer story is sterner and more interesting. This was a working machine of war, raised by viscounts, perfected by kings, and tested by crusade and chevauchée, that outlived the only job it was built to do. Left for dead, quarried for its stone, and crowded with the poor, it owed its second life to a scholar who would not give up and an architect who could not resist it. Walk the walls today and you walk Roman foundations, medieval towers, and a nineteenth-century architect’s confident guesses about what the Middle Ages should look like, all at once. Carcassonne does not hide that layering. What a visitor walks through is both a real medieval city and a nineteenth-century reconstruction of one.

Principal Sources

Centre des monuments nationaux. remparts-carcassonne.fr and its visitor materials, including the pages “Informations pratiques”, “Visites et activités”, “Offre adaptée aux visiteurs en mobilité réduite” and “Histoire du monument”, the Registre public d’accessibilité (2025), the teachers’ dossier “La légende de Dame Carcas” and the monument’s fiche de visite.
Guillaume de Puylaurens. Chronique (Chronica magistri Guillelmi de Podio Laurentii), ed. and trans. Jean Duvernoy. Éditions du CNRS, 1976.
Guillaume de Tudela and an anonymous continuator. La Chanson de la croisade contre les Albigeois, vol. II (translation), ed. and trans. Paul Meyer. Renouard, for the Société de l’histoire de France, 1879. archive.org.
ICOMOS. Advisory Body Evaluation, The Historic Fortified Town of Carcassonne (No. 345rev), September 1997.
Ministère de l’Europe et des Affaires étrangères. “UNESCO World Heritage Committee: two inscriptions of French sites on the World Heritage List.” Statement of 28 July 2026. diplomatie.gouv.fr.
Ministère de la Culture. Base Mérimée, notice PA00102588, Cité de Carcassonne.
Ministère de la Culture. Cité de Carcassonne resources, including the chronology of the Viollet-le-Duc and Boeswillwald restoration campaigns.
Régie des transports de Carcassonne Agglo (RTCA). Lignes et horaires, line 3 Palaja – Chénier Gare, and the network’s timetable data on transport.data.gouv.fr.
UNESCO World Heritage Centre. “Historic Fortified City of Carcassonne.” whc.unesco.org.
UNESCO World Heritage Committee. Report of the 21st session, Naples, 1-6 December 1997 (WHC-97/CONF.208/17).
Ville de Carcassonne. Account of the restoration.

Published accounts give the year rampart work began variously as 1852, 1853 or 1855, and their tower counts vary with what is included.

Image credits. Hero, the Château Comtal and its bridge: Diego Delso, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons; the Cité in panorama: Lesueur André, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons; the Tour de la Charpenterie: Lynx1211, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons; the medieval mural in the Château Comtal: Tylwyth Eldar, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons; the Porte Narbonnaise: Diego Delso, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons; the lices: Krzysztof Golik, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons; the ramparts in 1881: Bibliothèque de Toulouse, no restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons; the Château Comtal around 1890: Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons; a reconstructed hoarding: Inferno986return, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons; visitors at the Château Comtal: Tournasol7, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons; Carcassonne from the Pont Neuf (gallery): Lesueur André, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons; the walled Cité from the fields (gallery): Swedish National Heritage Board, no restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons; the Porte d’Aude (gallery): Lynx1211, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons; a tower spiral stair (gallery): Joe Mabel, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons; the Château Comtal courtyard (gallery): CharlèneChtl, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons; the Plan général engraving (gallery): public domain, via Wikimedia Commons; the lices in 1883 (gallery): Bibliothèque de Toulouse, no restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons; the château on a vintage postcard (gallery): Combier, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Freely licensed images are resized to fit; any other change, such as a crop, is named in the credit.

Carcassonne Castle