Carcassonne stacks 2,500 years of defensive history on one hill — Gallo-Roman ramparts, Visigothic towers, the 1209 crusade against the Cathars, and the royal Bastide founded below in 1247. Three days following that story past the walls everyone photographs.
Consecrated in 1096 and the Cité's cathedral until 1801: a Romanesque nave in grey sandstone meets a 13th-century Gothic choir holding the finest stained glass in the Midi, including the Tree of Jesse. Open 9:00–17:45.
The Cité's western gate and its steep walled ramp down to the river — the pressure point of Simon de Montfort's siege in August 1209, when Viscount Raymond-Roger Trencavel surrendered after fifteen days without water.
Four Cathar keeps on a single rock spur 16km north — Cabaret, Surdespine, Quertinheux and Tour Régine — which held out against the crusaders until 1229. The belvedere opposite gives the classic four-castle view. Open 10:00–18:00.
The 14th-century bridge that was the only crossing of the Aude until 1846, linking the Cité's suburb of Trivalle to the royal Bastide. Twelve arches, pedestrian since 1990, with the Calvaire chapel standing at its eastern end.
Founded in 1836 in the old Présidial building above the municipal library: Dutch and Flemish 17th-century painting, works by Chardin and Courbet, and faïence from the Languedoc workshops. Open Tue–Sat, 10:00–12:00 and 14:00–18:00.
The grid town Louis IX ordered in 1247 after razing the riverside suburbs, rebuilt again after the Black Prince burned it in 1355. The 1770 Neptune fountain in Carrara marble anchors the Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday market.
The room at 53 rue de Verdun where the poet Joë Bousquet lay paralysed by a 1918 bullet at Vailly, shutters closed for 32 years, receiving Éluard, Aragon, Ernst and Simone Weil. His library stands as he left it in 1950.
Built around 1247 inside the new Bastide, fortified with a bastion after the raid of 1355, and raised to cathedral rank in 1803 when the bishopric moved down from the Cité. Viollet-le-Duc reworked the single nave in the 1850s.
On rue du Grand Puits, in a house built over one of the Cité's medieval wells: instruments and archives of the Dominican tribunal that sat here from 1229, when Carcassonne became the northern seat of the anti-Cathar Inquisition.
The suburb below the ramparts where the Cité's expelled inhabitants resettled after 1240. The Hôpital Saint-Louis, the 17th-century tanners' houses along rue Trivalle and the old wash-house survive between the bridge and the Porte d'Aude ramp.
The Bastide's 14th-century Gothic church, with the second-widest nave in France and a 54m tower that Pierre Méchain used in the 1790s to survey the Paris meridian arc defining the metre. 232 steps to the platform.
The 1778 monumental gate of the Bastide, last of the four cut into the walls Louis XIV had rebuilt, and the only one to survive the 1820s demolition that turned the ramparts into today's ring of boulevards.