Aigues-Mortes rises from the flat marsh of the western Camargue, a complete ring of medieval walls standing alone on the plain. Louis IX — Saint Louis — built the port here in the thirteenth century to give the kingdom of France its own door to the Mediterranean, and twice sailed from it for the Crusades. The sea has since retreated; the walls remain.
I. The walls Saint Louis built
You can walk the ramparts the whole way round, a circuit of towers and curtain wall above the rooftops. The great Tour de Constance anchors one corner — a lighthouse, a keep, and later a prison. Inside the walls the town is a tight grid of lanes around the Place Saint-Louis, where the king stands in stone among the plane trees.
“The town has not moved in seven centuries; only the sea has changed its mind.”
II. The salt that turns the water pink
East of the walls stretch the Salins du Midi, lagoons still worked for salt as they have been since antiquity. In late summer the shallow water turns rose-pink — the work of a microscopic algae, Dunaliella salina — and the harvested salt is heaped into a gleaming white mountain, the camelle. Flamingos wade the edges, the same colour as the water.
III. The edge of the Camargue
Beyond the salt the true Camargue begins — white horses, black bulls, and the gardians who herd them on horseback. The little fishing port of Le Grau-du-Roi lies a few kilometres south, where the Rhône’s western arm finally meets the sea it took Saint Louis a fortified town to reach.
