Carcassonne Tourism-count’s castle in Carcassonne
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Carcassonne Tourism-count’s castle
This castle, despite it has experienced almost no fight and battle has undergone many changes and renovations since it has been built by Bernard Aton Trencavel in the 11th century.
The entrance of the castle is at the end of a stone bridge running over a dry ditch. The castle was built on a former Visigoth fortress of which it kept some parts of walls and two towers on the western side of the Cité, close to the inner wall, above the steepest side of the hill, and on the eastern side are the ditches where you can walk under the walls and see the bridge, You already have seen on the previous pictures the wooden additions to the walls, hoardings, allowing defenders a wider field of fire; Viollet Le Duc added these hoardings when he renovated the castle, trying to give it its original appearance; the hoardings were there originally, but certainly not the slate roofs on the towers, some websites assert the roofs were made with local material (and many copy each other with such an ease, spreading erroneous information), which of course cannot be true as the closest slate quarries are more than 80 km away from Carcassone, and it does not at all correspond to the local construction style; if there were roofs, these were more flat, with clay Roman type tiles.
To visit the castle, you walk over the bridge and pay an entrance fee of 8 Euros. Inside you can visit a museum laid out in some parts of the habitations, and in the yard, displays of medieval military “art”, with reconstructions of battles, types of sieges, etc.