Photo : Chensiyuan / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Cité de Carcassonne
The Cité de Carcassonne is a fortified town overlooking the Aude. Its origin goes back to an oppidum, which the Romans fortified in the second century BC and called Carcaso. It then passed to the Visigoths, then to the Trencavel, who ruled it from 1082. After the siege of 1209, during the crusade against the Albigensians, it entered the royal domain; Louis IX then had the second enclosure built.
The site has 52 towers and three kilometres of double ramparts, arranged in two enclosures separated by lists (lices). The Gallo-Roman towers are horseshoe-shaped, while the medieval towers are mostly round. Among the buildings: the Comtal castle, built around 1130 by Bernard Aton IV Trencavel, and the Basilica of Saint-Nazaire, whose construction was authorised in 1096. Four gates give access to the whole: Narbonnaise, Saint-Nazaire, d'Aude and du Bourg.
Eugène Viollet-le-Duc restored it from the 1850s, which partly gave it its current look. The Cité has been UNESCO World Heritage since 1997 and remains inhabited.
