"Memories of Carcassonne" a Carcassonne Travel Page by Renteboy

To be honest my travel report is a bit delayed. It is now April 2006 and I have visited Carcassonne in July, 2005. However the place is still burn marked in my memory I am now able to give you more details how I felt about that place.

I will skip the historical info about the place for now, because if you will visit it you definitely will find out every detail of it. To summarize, it was a Celtic village that during time migrated to a double walled city with a fortress inside of it? I bet the "owner" lived by the quote "come and get me" :-)
Anyway if you walk "La Cite" that the Fresh called the place, you are able to see the different styles of architecture in the constructions of the walls. There are celtic, roman and middle age constructions sometimes literally above each other.

The biggest part of the historical heritage happened in the 13th and 14th century. It all has something to do with the Religion wars that time. Some sort of Christian religion different from the Catholics was booming enormously so the head of the Catholics ordered crusades to slaughter these men, woman and children (I am trying to put my impression in these facts, sorry ;-) ) As those people lived and owned many castles you can imagine that these events did not go unnoticed. And so it happened until ever one was killed. Carcassonne was also on the list of the crusaders and upon attack a Capitan asked its general how his men could see the difference between the Catholics and the others. So the general replied back, kill them all, God will recognize his people.

Now, I guess you want to know what you can do over there today. I be honest, you must see it once but I will bet you, you would not see it again. The fortress and the walled city is more than impressive, but once you are inside of that place, the place is packed with tourist and each house is a shop selling every souvenir you can imagine. That is the major down side of the story. The real city is in the North West of it and eventually does not differ a lot from most of these beautiful cities in that part of France.