Château de Blanchefort et son trésor des Wisigoths

Rennes-les-Bains

On a peak of pale rock above Rennes-les-Bains, almost nothing remains of the château de Blanchefort: a few traces of walls, the cistern, the base of the keep. Yet the place carries old tales. In 1880 the scholar Louis Fédié reported two of them. According to the first, a queen Blanche, who came to be treated at the baths of Rennes, founded the castle. Fédié judged this impossible: the fortress was destroyed before her stay. According to the second, its underground passages hid part of the treasure of the Visigoths. To explain this belief, he cited the historian Guillaume Catel (1633): near the baths of Rennes, old gold and silver mines had left large caverns. An entrance shaft opened at the foot of the walls, and Fédié writes that it could still be seen. In the Middle Ages, he thought, these metals were believed to come from ingots buried by the Visigothic kings, and not from the ground. In 1849 another travel account says that the treasure is guarded in the ruins by ‘a legion of goblins’, and that the mountain contains the remains of an old copper mine. The more recent versions, with the Templars or the curé Saunière, are found in none of these sources.

Louis Fédié, Le comté de Razès et le diocèse d'Alet, Carcassonne, 1880 — texte intégral (Internet Archive) ↗

Getting there: The ruins, almost invisible, are on a rocky promontory above the confluence of the Sals and the Rialsesse (Wikipédia); OpenStreetMap places them near the road D 312. Access on foot, ownership and exact path not verified: enquire at the Rennes-les-Bains tourist office.

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

Ambient sound