Cathar castles
France > Languedoc > Southern > Cathar castles

Les Arques © Claude choisel

Romantic and ruined, the medieval fortresses which range in a broad arc around Carcassonne have come to be known as the Cathar castles, though in fact many of the castles in question were built after the Cathars' demise. The Cathars were a sect strong in this part of France, who were proscribed as heretics by Pope Innocent III. With papal blessing and the connivance of the French kings, hungry northern nobles descended on the area in a series of Albigensian crusades, beginning in 1208 and led for many years by the notoriously cruel Simon de Montfort. The name of the sect derives from the Greek word for "clean, pure", katharos, as they abhorred the materialism and worldly power of the established Church, proclaiming the simple and humble Christianity of the Sermon on the Mount. Although their adherents probably never accounted for more than ten percent of the population, there were many members of the nobility and the influential classes among them, which alarmed the powers that be.

Cathars who were caught were burnt in communal conflagrations, 100 or 200 at a time. Their lands were laid waste or seized by the northern nobles, de Montfort himself grabbing the properties of the count of Toulouse. The effect of this brutality was to unite both the Cathars and their Catholic neighbours in southern solidarity against the barbarous north. Though military defeat became irreversible with the capitulation of Toulouse in 1229 and the fall of the castle of Montségur in 1244, it took the informers and torturers of the Holy Inquisition another seventy years to root out Cathars completely.

The best of the castles are in the arid, herb-scented hills of the Corbières to the south of Carcassonne. Walking is undoubtedly the most direct way to experience them, and there are numerous paths, of which the GR36, crossing from Carcassonne to St-Paul-de-Fenouillet, and the Sentier Cathare, crossing east to west from Port La-Nouvelle to Foix, are the most exciting. The Sentier Cathare is divided into twelve stages with gîtes d'étape, described in Sentier Cathare Topoguide (Rando Editions), available in local bookstores.

Without transport or walking boots, the best way to tackle them is from the south, as the most spectacular ones are close to the Perpignan–Quillan road, which has a bus service. With transport it becomes possible to explore the wilder back roads and utterly ruinous castles like Durfort and Termes, and to cross the cols where orchids and cowslips shudder in the spring winds and the views southward all end in the snowy Pyrenean bulk of Canigou.