Château de Quéribus: Vertigo, Vineyards & Very Good Wine at The Last Cathar Stronghold

“The last mile or so is a 17% gradient,” Mark told me as he flung The Beast around tight hairpins.

The road we were climbing was ‘only’ 10%, and I wasn’t enjoying the view from my side. I stared down a dizzying expanse of nothingness that I knew had no margin for error.

Silently, I prayed that nothing came the other way. The Beast occupied the entire width, and I didn’t trust placing 17 tonnes on a road edge held aloft by nothing more than hope and fresh air.

In addition, I didn’t like the thought of a 10% descent.

With this in mind, I offered a considered response.  

“I don’t think a 17% gradient would be a good idea, Mark. What goes up must come down, and I really don’t fancy testing our brakes on a slope nearly twice this steep…”

We pulled up on a fairly flat gravel col, a notch between two peaks, just short of the final push up to the castle. Above us, in three tiers with its upper storey clinging to the highest pinnacle in the area, Château de Quéribus soared out of the limestone like something conjured from fantasy.

Impressive didn’t come close.

Quéribus is one of the ‘Five Sons of Carcassonne’. A chain of magnificent fortresses that guarded the French border with Spain – until 1659, when the frontier shifted 37 miles (60 km) south.

Although not a Cathar castle in the strictest sense, many call Quéribus the last bastion of the Cathar religion. Cathar knight Chabert de Barbaira held it and sheltered the surviving Cathars as they fled following the fall of Montségur.

In a strange twist, Chabert surrendered his supposedly impregnable fortress without a fight.

 Once his friend – and once a fellow Cathar – Olivier de Termes arrived in 1255 at the head of a French army. His mission was to annihilate the remaining Cathars. No one knows what deal they struck. Why would Charbert hand over such a formidable stronghold so peacefully to the crown?

For his freedom?

To spare the Cathar refugees?

Or was it a grand deception?

Not knowing gave me the sense that history is missing a page or two.

We spent a relaxed afternoon contemplating whether to stroll up the single-track lane to the fortress.

Then I saw a coach coming down!

“If a coach can get up there, we can!” I said to Mark with all the confidence of one who has suddenly forgotten one’s weight, width, and a 17% gradient.

The castle was open until 7 p.m., so we set off in the late afternoon, hoping for fewer oncoming vehicles.

Particularly coaches.

The climb was precipitous but manageable. There were a few passing places, but we tried not to think about meeting anything large coming around a corner.

At the top, the car park was on an incline that was skiable. “It’s not as flat as the one down there…” I ventured.

Mark ignored me and continued to power The Beast upwards through the parking area. We hit a crater-sized pothole. Briefly, I achieved weightlessness.

We stopped on the narrow summit, and Mark got out of the cab to assess the brilliant, level park-up he’d scoped out on Google Earth. He stared at the commanding views over the countryside and turned the colour of chartreuse.

“I can’t stay here,” he said. “I feel like it’s going to collapse…”

It was solid rock, but it felt ‘airy’.

Vertiginous, even.

From every angle, the only way was down.

There was no room to U-turn, so I guided him back down in reverse. We avoided the crater and parked in a marginally less heart-stopping space opposite the ticket office.

Since we could still roll an egg across the truck’s floor, we pledged to return to our lovely flat col later, when the road was quiet.

The lady in the ticket booth was wonderfully friendly. She was local, but had returned recently from several years living in Paris and Ireland. “There is so much to see here!” she told us. “Now I’m back, I have a huge list!”

I asked if it was okay to pay by card, given it was Bloquons Tout – ‘Block Everything’ day. The protest encouraged citizens to avoid card transactions to sabotage the banks.

She dismissed it with a wave and swiped my card. “That’s more for in the city,” she said.

The ascent to Quéribus was steep and scented with wild thyme. Below, the Corbières Massif rolled in every direction, with vineyards sheltered between the hills. Behind, the immense peaks of the Pyrenees rose in blue, shadowy layers that faded as they merged with the horizon. A fan of golden light, God’s spotlights, spread through the clouds to glorify the majesty of the landscape.

We scaled steep stone steps to reach the castle, which sits 2,388 ft (728 m) above sea level.

Neither of us is comfortable with heights, and the entire time I was up there, I felt like my stomach was ready to jump ship.

And yet, I couldn’t disagree with Mark when he said, “It’s the best place I’ve ever visited!” We had the whole fortress to ourselves, with the wind whipping around the ancient stones and the evening sunshine gilding the valley below.

Quéribus spills down its crag on three levels. Access is via a steep, winding staircase, segmented by a series of doors designed to trap would-be assailants in killing zones. It took only a handful of men to defend the castle, because anyone who made it through would be shot like fish in a barrel.

The second set of ramparts encloses the barracks and a large water tank. The castle had an ingenious system of cascading, gravity-fed tanks that collected rainwater from the roof. This one held nearly 13,000 gallons (60,000 litres) – a medieval swimming pool concealed within a cliff!

The third and highest tier houses the towering keep and the governor’s lodgings.

Once captured from Charbert, the French King expanded and fortified the castle. When we looked closely at the stonework, we could make out the faint, spectral trace of where Charbert’s keep joined the tower.

Inside the base of the keep, a musty black portal beckoned into a rather mysterious, unlit tunnel. I crept in, using my phone as a torch and fumbled my way down worn steps to a chamber hewn into the heart of the mountain. I imagined medieval archers firing through the loopholes, protected within the impenetrable embrace of rock.

At the top of the tower, the 360-degree panorama was staggering. Château de Peyrepertuse – the largest of the ‘Five Brothers’ – a white stone dragon stretched along a distant ridge.

I also spotted Quéribus’ weakness.

The tower’s shadow fell across a neighbouring limestone bluff, which an attacker with portable artillery could seize to initiate an assault. The king knew that too – so he reinforced that side of the castle.

 Although it made me feel properly queasy, I couldn’t stop staring out from the ramparts.  

But when I drew my gaze closer, the quality of the building’s stonework stunned me.

The spiral staircase and precision-cut doorways showcased the skill of the masons. Even weathered by centuries, traces of ornate carvings stlll clung to the corbels. But the Salle du Pilier   – the Pillar Room – with its towering vaulted ceiling, really blew me away. Four sets of crossed arches spread all the weight of the structure into one central pillar.

It was elegant – and virtually indestructible.

As we walked down, Mark banned me from taking any more photos.

Perhaps my proud admission that I’d snapped 180 on our hike to St. Pierre that morning didn’t help.

But Quéribus, with its views stretching over the Corbières, was simply too photogenic!

I kept quiet about how many I took there…

The drive down was blessedly uneventful, although I needed some time for the nausea to subside before cooking dinner.

We had pan-fried duck breast with honeyed carrots, green beans, and baby potatoes. We cracked open the bottle of Bordeaux gifted to us by Heike and Alex, whom we’d befriended in Mirmande. It was glorious – rich, smooth – and a fantastic way to round off such a special day!

Alone on our col, wild winds battered the truck all night. Feverish dreams about how medieval masons hauled tonnes of stone skywards with the technology available 1,000 years ago dogged me.

Still, I relished our isolation in the mountains.

I watched an almost-full moon slide into view between racing clouds.

When Mark wasn’t looking, I sneaked outside and captured a final, moody silhouette of the castle by moonlight.

It was the perfect image of Quéribus.

Because it appeared completely unreal.

Join us next time as we walk into our view!

Did You Miss?

Below are links to the other posts in my Cathar Country series about the Languedoc in Southern France.

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Image – Château de Quéribus PhilippeContal, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.