Located in the Aude department in the Occitania region, the French city of Carcassonne is home to the ancient citadel known as the Cité de Carcassonne. It is located in the southeast of the city core, atop a hill on the right bank of Aude River. Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, an architect and thinker, renovated the citadel towards the end of the 19th century. Because of its remarkable witness to the design and layout of a medieval fortress town, it was inscribed on the UNESCO list of World Heritage Sites in 1997. Founded in the Gallo-Roman era, the fame of the citadel comes from its double enclosing walls, spanning three kilometers, punctuated by fifty-two turrets. With a roughly 2,500-year history, the town has had periods of Roman, Visigothic, and Crusader occupation. It was a Gaulish village in the beginning, and the Romans opted to fortify it as a town in the third century CE. The settlement is referred to as a castellum in 333 CE, when the Roman defenses were in place. Between 34 and 40 towers, placed 18 to 30 meters apart along the curtain wall, supported the ancient walls. Each tower was roughly 14 meters tall and had a semicircular floor plan. The village had around forty primary entrances. The basic structure of the Gallo-Roman walls was preserved even after they were renovated in the fifth and sixth centuries when the Visigoths occupied the town. With his many building projects, Bernard Aton IV Trencavel, vicomte of Albi, Nîmes, and Béziers, ushered in a prosperous era for the city. In Languedoc, a new sect known as Catharism emerged during this time. Bernard Aton V began rebuilding the Gallo-Roman defenses and building a mansion for himself in 1130. For the first time, a whole fortification encircled the Cité of Carcassonne. Three or four thousand people lived in the city at this period, including those who lived in the two communities located beneath the walls of the Cité, the bourg Saint-Vincent to the north and the bourg Saint-Michel to the south of the Narbon gate. Outside the Roman walls, a second line of defenses was erected after 1226. In 1247, the town was at last annexed by the French Crown. It offered the Crown of Aragon and France a solid French frontier. The new outer walls were strengthened and extended to the south during this time, while the inner Roman walls were mostly destroyed and rebuilt. Following the Treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659, the region of Roussillon was incorporated into France, and the military importance of the town diminished. After the fortifications were abandoned, the town developed into one of major economic hubs of France, specializing in the production of woolen textiles. The French government determined in 1849 that the defenses of the city ought to be destroyed. The locals were vehemently against this choice. Later, the government changed its mind, and restoration efforts got underway in 1853. Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, an architect, was tasked with restoring the castle. Following his passing in 1879, his student Paul Boeswillwald carried on with the restoration work, which was eventually taken over by architect Nodet
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[Wikipedia-Link : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cit%C3%A9_de_Carcassonne ]
[Image : Constructed in the fourteenth century, the Pont-Vieux overlooks the Cité and has been recognized as a historical monument since 1926; Wikipedia-Image Author : Txllxt TxllxT]
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Monuments and Architecture
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