The Rough Guide to Languedoc & Roussillon

INTRODUCTION The Languedoc and Roussillon region is one of France’s best-kept secrets. While Provence and the Cote d’Azur just across the Rhone have been living it up, attracting movie stars and the masses, its less pretentious neighbour has remained in comfortable obscurity. And so much the better for those in the know: a dramatically varied landscape, two distinct, proud cultures – Occitan and Catalan, a tradition of heresy and steadfast rebellion, and age-old customs all combine to make this a region deservedly unmatched in its romantic associations, at once epitomizing and contradicting everything that is France. Now shaking off centuries of sleepy neglect, Languedoc and Roussillon is emerging as one of the most enticing parts of the country, its remote villages and little-travelled byways affording a much-needed window onto a rural culture no longer found in northern France. The boundaries of Languedoc have never been easy to fix. In its broadest – and original – sense, Languedoc includes the lands where the Occitan language (the langue d’Oc) was spoken in the Middle Ages, an area stretching along the Mediterranean from the foothills of the Pyrenees to the Italian Alps, and spreading north towards Savoy, through the Massif Central and west along the Atlantic coast, taking in even Bordeaux. Nowadays, for administrative purposes, it has been lumped together with its neighbour as the modern région of Languedoc-Roussillon, and trimmed down to the strip of coast running from Montpellier west to the border of Spain. But this latter, narrow definition of Languedoc is as inappropriate as the traditional one is vague. In defining Languedoc in this Guide, we’ve avoided artificial boundaries in favour of cultural and historical uniformity and the logistics of travel, so that the region covered butts up to neighbouring Provence at the Rhone, and stretches west and inland to include the medieval capital of Toulouse, as well as the lands of neighbouring Albi and Foix. Roussillon, Languedoc’s accidental partner squashed in between the eastern Pyrenees and the Corbieres hills, is also characterized by a particular linguistic heritage, derived in this case from a long history as part of the Catalan confederacy centred in Barcelona. Both regions have distinct cultures but, in addition to their border, share a common history of occupation, and of resistance and submission to the modern France of Paris and the north. They also share a land renowned for its isolation, and immense diversity. On the far eastern edge, the Rhone disgorges into the swampy delta of the Camargue, the majority of which, east of the Petit Rhône, falls into adjacent Provence, leaving a small portion, the ranching territory of the Petite Camargue with its abundance of bird and wildlife, to Languedoc. A coastline of nearly unbroken beach bends west from here, punctuated by ancient fishing villages and their modern resort counterparts, while inland, beyond the band of the coastal plain, the land gradually rises, from scrubby hills to the cool, wooded highlands of Haut Languedoc and the forbidding peaks of the Montagne Noir. Great rivers, the Herault, Orb and Aude, have carved their way down through the hills, leaving spectacular gorges, while vines and olive trees intersperse the rocks, giving way to a blanket of oak in the heights. West of Haut Languedoc the grain fields and vineyards extending from Toulouse to Albi are a world apart, while below it the Canal du Midi, a seventeenth-century waterway, bisects the region; south of its stately, cypress-lined banks the terrain rises again, first tentatively as the Corbieres hills and the barren Pays de Sault, then surging skyward as the snow-capped Pyrenees. As the mountains draw close the coastline transforms into a series of rocky coves, while above, solitary Mount Canigou lords it over the deeply etched valleys of Roussillon. The extraordinary geophysical range of Languedoc and Roussillon is matched by an historical legacy that lends the area much of its appeal. Settled as far back as any part of Europe, the region boasts evidence of our ancestors of over a half million years ago, while habitation in the Ariège valley some fifteen to thirty thousand years ago has yielded a rich and mysterious heritage of prehistoric cave art, some of the most engaging in southern Europe. As history dawned, the hill forts of Celtic tribes, or oppida, punctuated the broad Mediterranean plain – their scattered remnants are still visible today – while later Phoenician and Greek colonization on the coast paved the way for the eventual Roman expansion into the area in the second-century BC. The Romans built almost every town of importance in Languedoc today – the greatest being Nimes, Narbonne and Toulouse – and linked them by roads such as the mighty Via Domitia, which sliced through the region to link Rome with southern Spain. An outstanding array of Roman monuments is the result, including Nimes’ amphitheatre and probably the world’s most famous aqueduct, the Pont du Gard.