Aigues-Mortes, la tour de Constance

Aigues-Mortes

In 1240, the king of France had no port on the Mediterranean: Marseille belonged to his brother Charles, Montpellier to the king of Aragon, Agde to the count of Toulouse. Louis IX then obtained, by exchange, from the monks of the abbey of Psalmody, in the marshes of the delta, a place called Aigues-Mortes, the "dead waters", linked to the sea by a channel, and from 1242 he had raised there a round tower twenty-two metres in diameter, with walls said to be six metres thick at the base, set on wooden piles in the sand: the Tour de Constance. It housed the garrison and carried, in its iron lantern, the fire that guided ships. It was from here that the king embarked on 25 August 1248 for Egypt, and from here again, on 1 July 1270, for Tunis, from which he would not return. The ramparts one sees today are those of his successors: Philip III began them in 1272 with a Genoese contractor, Philip the Fair completed them, and the town laid out in a grid behind them remains what it was, a stronghold among the lagoons. The tower served as a prison: forty-five Templars were interrogated there in November 1307, and, after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, Protestant women were shut up there, among them Marie Durand, who entered at nineteen and was freed thirty-eight years later; on the rim of the well, one can still read the word "register", resist.

Wikipédia — Tour de Constance ↗

Getting there : By the D 979 from Nîmes or the D 62 from Montpellier; SNCF station at Aigues-Mortes, on the line from Nîmes to Le Grau-du-Roi, less than five hundred metres from the ramparts. Car parks outside the walls. The towers and ramparts are managed by the Centre des monuments nationaux: paid entry (free for under-eighteens and for young people from the European Union under twenty-six), every day except 1 January, 1 May and 25 December, from 10 am to 7 pm from May to August and from 10 am to 5.30 pm the rest of the year (opening times to be checked). The visit takes in the Tour de Constance and then the wall walk, one thousand six hundred metres of curtain walls and towers; allow an hour and a half.

Opening times and access details are given as a guide only: check before you set out.

Ambient sound