On a tour of Europe in 1998, our tour stopped in the town of Carcasonne, France. The town is located completely inside the walls of a castle, a “castle town.” We were told it was the location of where the Robin Hood movie with Kevin Costner was filmed.
Carcassonne (Carcassona in Occitan) is a fortified French town, in the Aude département of which it is the préfecture, in the former province of Languedoc. It is separated into the fortified Cité de Carcassonne and the more expansive lower city, the ville basse. The folk etymology – involving a châtelaine named Carcas, a ruse ending a siege and the joyous ringing of bells ("Carcas sona") – though memorialized in a neo-Gothic sculpture of Mme Carcas on a column near the Narbonne Gate—is of modern invention. The fortress, which was thoroughly restored from 1853 by the theorist and architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, was added to the UNESCO list of World Heritage Sites in 1997.
11 February 2008
From:
Kelley Dukat
Carcassonne, Région Languedoc-Roussillon, FR
Discovered by Kelley Dukat
on 11 February 2008.
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