cathar castles

Yesterday, we drove south and east of Limoux for a tour of Cathar castles. The Cathar religion was declared heretical by the Catholic church in the late middle ages, and its adherents were wiped out in the 13th century, first by the Albigensian Crusade and then the Inquisiton. The ruins of some of their castles are still standing today — all of them built on (and from) the peaks of high rocky hills, with wide views of the valleys below.

We visited three of them: Puilarens, Quéribus, and Peyrepertuse. They each required a long walk on foot uphill through the woods, then up stone steps for the last couple hundred meters.

Two notes:

- The photo of the church is a village at the base of the hill, with Puilarens castle in the background. (The other two castles were at the tops of much higher hills.)

- The very last photo is looking back into a gorge we drove through. If you look closely (center-right), there's a hermitage clinging to the side of the cliff, which is only accessible on foot.

[Click to see the photos bigger]