A Carcassonne Tour: History and Highlights Along its Medieval Walls

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Carcassonne audio tour: A Carcassonne Tour: History and Highlights Along its Medieval Walls

This is a 1.6mi walking tour

It takes an average of 180 mins to complete.

Carcassonne

France

$24.99

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About the Tour

Carcassonne is the largest medieval city in Europe with its walls still intact. It’s also one of the most recognisable and most visited tourist destinations in France, having been featured in many well-known movies. Despite all this, most tourists barely scratch the surface when they visit Cité de Carcassonne. On this self-guided walking tour around the UNESCO World Heritage site, I’ll point out some of its most interesting architectural features, and bring its history to life.

Starting outside the medieval city walls, I’ll show you the Buste de Dame Carcas (a sculpture of Lady Carcas) and tell you the story of how she saved the city from Charlemagne. As you enter the city through Porte Narbonnaise (Narbonne Gate, you’ll begin following the wall, which encircles the old city. Along the way, you’ll also learn about the Cathars who flourished here in the twelfth century, the crusade launched against them, and some of the sieges that took place here. You’ll hear about the many different peoples who have occupied this place, and its military role over more than a millennium.

You’ll also:

Find out about the brief Muslim period, in between the Visigoths and the Franks
Hear the tragic story of the Cathars that culminated here
Listen to the story of how a flying pig helped save the city
Learn why the Papal Inquisition was implemented here long before the Spanish Inquisition existed
Discover the role played by Saint Dominic and his Dominican friars in establishing Inquisition practices to eliminate what they regarded as “heresy”
Take in the impressive and centuries-old Château et Ramparts of the ancient Cité of Carcassonne, also known as the Château Comtal, where the castle meets the wall and its surrounding defenses
See the Church of Saints Nazaire and Celse, the city’s two patron saints
Inspect the monument de la Jean Pierre Cros Mayrevieille, a doctor of law, a historian and an Inspector of Historic Monuments who saved the city from ruin
Learn to identify the many “killing zones” in which enemies risked being trapped while besieging the city

On this three-hour tour, you won’t just trace the walls of Carcassonne, you’ll also venture into its centre through various gates including the Aude, Nazaire, and Toulouse Gates. Join me, James McDonald, an English historian of the medieval period specialising in the Languedoc, as I bring these old stones to life.

Tour Producer

James McDonald

4 tours

James is a British historian specialising in church history and warfare in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

His special talent lies in presenting history in an easily digestible. He is able to make rigorous history entertaining, whatever your existing level of knowledge.

James is an expert in Catharism, a popular so-called heresy that flourished in the Languedoc during the High Middle Ages. He has been researching Catharism and its relationship with early Christianity for over twenty years.

He writes on a range of topics including Gnostic Dualism, the Cathars of the Languedoc, the Counts of Toulouse, Occitania, Medieval Warfare and the Inquisition.

His work is characterised by serious scholarship combined with an entertaining style. A polymath, he has also written on subjects as diverse as computer simulation, mathematical problems, early Christianity, English etymology, castle architecture, philosophy, and comparative philology. He is the webmaster of www.cathar.info and www.catharcastles.info

James has travelled extensively in Central Asia and Southern Asia, researching Zoroastrianism and other Dualist religions. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society in London in 1990.

Preview Location

Location 26

Tower of the Inquisition

Coming up on the left after the gateway is a Roman tower with a spectacular medieval talus.

Have a look at it and then walk on past it. Notice how narrow the lists are here.

Please stop here about ten yards before the next tower on the left. You can sit comfortably on th... Coming up on the left after the gateway is a Roman tower with a spectacular medieval talus.

Have a look at it and then walk on past it. Notice how narrow the lists are here.

Please stop here about ten yards before the next tower on the left. You can sit comfortably on the right, just before the tower on that side.

Take a look at the inner wall. You'll notice a clean vertical division in styles. The left half of the wall is Roman, which you'll recognise by the small stones & horizontal layers of red tile, while the right is medieval. Clearly, this part of the Roman wall had to be replaced, possibly because of undermining in the medieval period.

Now, look at the medieval tower to the right of that stretch of the inner wall. You should see a plaque in black slate. On it is inscribed in French the words "Tour de l'Inquisition". This is the Tower of the Inquisition we mentioned before. In medieval times a passageway connected it to the House of the Inquisition inside the Cité, not far away, and also in the Ecclesiastical Quarter. If you remember, early Dominican Inquisitors kept all their victims imprisoned here, until they built a new facility called "The Wall" nearby, just outside the Cité walls, to accommodate the overflow.

The following is an extract from an open letter written around 1285 by the Consuls of Carcassonne to Jean Galand, a Dominican Inquisitor at Carcassonne, designed to embarrass him publicly. The Consuls had complained about Brother Galand to everyone they could, including the pope, but without result. Public embarrassment was their last chance. So they addressed a letter directly to him, but ensured that copies were widely circulated.

Contrary to the practice and custom of your predecessors, you have created a prison called "The Wall", which would be better called "Hell". In it, you have constructed small cells to inflict pain and mistreat people using various types of torture. Some cells are so dark and airless that those imprisoned there cannot tell whether it is night or day. They permanently lack air and light. In other cells, the miserable prisoners remain in fetters – of either wood or metal – and are unable to move. They excrete and urinate where they are, and cannot lie down except on their backs on the cold earth ... In other places in the prison, they lack air and light and also food, except the "bread of adversity, and the water of affliction" which are provided only rarely. Some are placed on the chevelet; many of them have lost the use of their limbs because of the severity of the torture and are rendered entirely powerless ... Life for them is agony and death a relief. Under these constraints they affirm as true what is false, preferring to die once than to be thus tortured multiple times ... they accuse not only themselves but also others who are innocent, in order to escape their suffering in any way ... those who so confess reveal afterwards that what they have said to the Brother Inquisitors is not true, but false, and that they have confessed out of fear of the peril of the moment. To some of those that you cite you promise immunity so that they will more freely denounce others without fear.

It half worked. Galand was removed from office, but his replacements were not much better.

Incidentally, the "bread of adversity, and the water of affliction" is a biblical quotation from the Book of Isaiah 30:20-21. In practice it meant a diet of stale bread and fetid water, a diet that was almost guaranteed to kill anyone within three months.

Let's continue. Keep going straight in the lists, heading towards a large square tower ahead which, unusually, spans the lists. Read More

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Major Landmarks

Cité de Carcassonne
Buste de Dame Carcas
Narbonne Gate
Porte Narbonnaise
Rodez Gate
Toulouse Gate
Aude Gate
Porte d’Aude
Château Comtal
Mayrevielle
Monument de la Jean-Pierre Cros-Mayrevieille
Tour de l'Inquisition
St Nazaire Gate
Hôtel de la Cité Carcassonne - MGallery
Church of Saints Nazaire and Celse
Basilique Saint Nazaire
Walls of Carcassonne
Maison de l'inquisition
Museum of the Inquisition
Château et remparts de la cité de Carcassonne
Carcassonne Festival
Saint-Gimer
Cimetière de la Cité de Carcassonne
Théâtre Jean-Deschamps
Rue du Comté Roger
Rue Cros Mayrevieille
Rue Raymond Roger Trencavel
Rue Dame Carcas
Rue Barbacane
Office de Tourisme de Carcassonne La Cité

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Getting There

Route Overview

VoiceMap tours follow a route from a set starting point. It’s how we give turn-by-turn directions and tell a story greater than the sum of its parts.

Start location
11000 Carcassonne, France
Total distance

3km
Final location
8 Rue Cros Mayrevieille, 11000 Carcassonne, France
Distance back to start location

83.45m

Directions to Starting Point

The tour begins a little way away from the Narbonne Gate, which is easy to find and marked on most maps. If in doubt you can Google "Porte Narbonnaise, Carcassonne". The actual start point is nearby at Lat. 43.207224, Long. 2.366228. You're in the right place to start the tour if what you're seeing is what you see in the photo after downloading the tour. You can also tap Get Directions.

To get to the starting point from Narbonnaise Gate, face the gate and turn right. Walk around the walls, keeping them on your left. When you reach the roundabout on your right, you're in the right spot.

There are car parks just over the road from the start point, and regular bus services - also a tourist train from the Ville Basse.

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Tips

Places to stop along the way

During the tour, we enter the Cité at three different points - all of which are close to restaurants, bars and stores (for example for water, sunblock, batteries, ATMs). Two attractions, the Basilica and the Château Comtal, merit separate visits, so we will see where they are, how to get to them, what they look like and what there is to see if you do visit the inside.

Best time of day

Early morning or an hour before sunset. There will be fewer tourists, and your photographs will be much better!

Precautions

No precautions needed. This is a safe and easy walk with no rough ground or steep climbs, but not suitable for wheelchairs.

Carcassonne is a modern city, so make sure that you head specifically for La Cité - the subject of this tour - a relatively small medieval walled town in the heart of the modern city of Carcassonne.

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