Fortresses of the old county of Carcassonne associated with the Cathar heresy and the Albigensian Crusade, including the royal frontier strongholds later marketed as Cathar castles.
The Château de Termes is a ruined fortress in the Corbières hills of the Aude, and it guards a quiet paradox. Its fame rests on the Cathar heresy and one of the longest sieges of the Albigensian Crusade, yet almost everything a visitor climbs to today is the work of the French crown that won…
The Cathar castles of southern France are among the most atmospheric ruins in Europe, and among the most misremembered. They stand on limestone crags across the old county of Carcassonne, in the Aude and the Ariège, and travel writing has bound them to a single word: Cathar, the name of a Christian faith that Rome…
The Châteaux de Lastours are not one castle but four, strung along a single knife-edge of rock in the Montagne Noire, a short drive north of Carcassonne. Cabaret, Tour Régine, Surdespine and Quertinheux stand almost in a line above the deep ravines of the Orbiel and the Grésillou, and from the viewpoint on the hillside…
Château de Puilaurens crowns a rocky spur 697 meters above sea level, high over the Boulzane valley, in the commune of Lapradelle-Puilaurens in the Aude, at the gateway to the Fenouillèdes. For four centuries it was the southernmost fortress of the kingdom of France, a royal sentinel watching the frontier with Aragon. Cathars sheltered here…
Château de Montségur, the last open stronghold of the Cathar church, fell in 1244 when about 220 Perfects were burned below the pog. The ruin on the summit today is the royal fortress the French crown built afterward.
Three Towers Above the Ariège Château de Foix stands where the Arget meets the Ariège, three towers on a limestone spur that has watched over the town of Foix for more than a thousand years. From the valley floor it reads as a single silhouette, blunt and unmistakable, the kind of outline a child draws…
A Castle to Make You Dizzy The Château de Quéribus does not so much sit on its mountain as balance on it. This fortress crowns a narrow spur of rock at 728 meters, on the southern crest of the Corbières, and from below its silhouette reads less like a building than like a tooth of…
The Ship on the Rock From the village of Duilhac, the first sight of the Château de Peyrepertuse is hard to credit. A wall of pale limestone climbs out of the garrigue, and along its summit, fused to the rock so completely that stone and masonry blur together, runs a fortress nearly three hundred meters…
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…