"Camping in the Pyrenees" Top 5 Page for this destination Languedoc-Roussillon by tompt

We had a week to do what we want. A crazy idea came up. Lets go camping in the south of France...... The camping in the Pyrenees we went to was 1500 km from home and we went on a busy saturday in july. We asked for trouble! It took us from 4 in the morning untill 10 at night. And then we had to put up our tent in the pitch dark. What had we done? The next morning when the sun was shining we had forgotten everything.

catalan flag

Roussillon was a part of Catalonia until the Spanish delivered it to France in the Treaty of the Pyrenees.

The term Catalonia is first mentioned in the early 12th century.
Ramon Berenguer III, Count of Barcelona is referred to as catalanicus heroes, rector catanicus, and dux catalanensis, and also the name Catalania is found. Catalanenses appears opposite gots (Goths), referring to the people of southern France.

In 1137 the counts of Barcelona became kings of Aragon. Catalonia and Aragon retained its traditional rights, and own personality with one of the first parliaments in Europe. During the 13th and 14th centuries Catalonia became one of the most important regions of Europe, dominating a maritime empire extending across the western Mediterranean Sea.

Thirteen years after the union (1479) of Aragon and Castile, which brought Catalonia into the new kingdom of Spain, the discovery of America by Columbus shifted Europe's economic centre of gravity from the Mediterranean Sea to the Atlantic Ocean and undermined Catalonia's economic and political importance.

The War for Catalan Independence started as an upraising of peasants in Barcelona. The Catalan Generalitat got involved in the struggle between the Spanish and the French crowns in the Thirty Years' War when the president Pau Claris declared the Catalan Republic under the protection of Louis XIII of France.

After the War of the Spanish Succession (1705-1714), Catalonia's traditional autonomy and privileges were revoked and Spain attempted to crush the Catalans' sense of identity as a nation. The Catalan language was repressed for the next two and a half centuries.