France: Playing Carcassonne in Carcassonne
Cité de Carcassonne, the very archetype of a medieval fortress. December 2019.
Most importantly, it opened up an opportunity to play Carcassonne (the board game) in Carcassonne (the medieval fortress city from which the game is named), and spend a day thinking about trebuchets along the way.
View of the fortress from the Old Bridge.
The fortress itself is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and is one of the best-preserved Roman citadels in Europe. Founded in the Gallo-Roman period in the 3rd Century, it has been a defensive fortress for the Romans, then the Visigoths, then Crusaders. It's the very archetype of a medieval fortress.
As our train to the city had been cancelled due to France's pension strikes at the time, we got there from Marseille by BlaBlaCar with a nice lady in an almost-antique Golf. Just as we turned off the motorway, the towers of the citadel came into view: it was already magnificent.
The citadel had plenty of tourists, though something seemed off - it soon became clear that the vast majority were Spanish, so much so that many of the signs in the fortress were trilingual including Spanish. It felt unusual, almost like an inverse Benidorm.
The ramparts watching over the Pyrenees
The paid area of the fortress was very interesting to walk around, and the view from the ramparts was excellent. It was clear that the fortress controlled the plains all across the local area, all the way to the Pyrenees in the distance and the Spanish border. It was a place that had witnessed much history over the millennia that the fortifications have stood. The exhibitions around the towers explained the citadel's history well, and even had a room titled "Siege Engines" filled with catapults and trebuchets. The gift shop even sold miniature trebuchets, from which I had to resist temptation.
After a day thinking about medieval sieges, we had dinner in the citadel bailey. Wikivoyage had recommended cassoulet as the regional dish of choice, a stew of sausage, beans and duck, which I thoroughly enjoyed together with some local wine and a cheese board. Fattening, but in a delicious way.
Local wine with the traditional regional cassoulet.
After a local bus to our hotel near the airport, one activity was essential. We had made a point of bringing the eponymous board game to the city. We'd considered playing it in the citadel itself, though there weren't really any good table-like surfaces to play it on, so we played a game once we got to the hotel. Here's the final game board:
The whole trip had essentially been building up to this game.
It had been a very good weekend, and we walked over to Carcassonne Airport with plenty of time to spare on the next morning. We soon discovered that the airport was so small that the airside area only opened an hour before each flight, and then the airport would just close after it left. It's such a small airport that the departure boards are just magnetic metal plates instead of anything electronic, and the arrivals baggage reclaim isn't a conveyor but is just a single metal desk. We even had to wait a while until the secure area opened.
The airport was so small that it only sees five flights per week; four of which (including ours) were on Sundays. It's one of the things that I quite like about Ryanair - it flies to such obscure airports that one can bask in the efficiency of a 15 minute flight turnaround at an airport much more used to private jets and light aviation. The views of the peaks of the Pyrenees poking out of the clouds as we took off were even pretty amazing, as well. All this for £10.
A walk across the tarmac for the flight back - one of five flights that the airport handles per week.
Summary:
Date: Saturday 7th - Sunday 8th December 2019
Main experience: Looking through the bit of the exhibition on siege engines in the Roman/medieval fortress.
Cost:
- Fortress entry: €9
- Carcassonne hotel: £23 each
- CCF - STN flight (FR73, 1020 - 1125): £10
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