The Canal du Midi was built in the seventeenth century to carry grain; today it carries cyclists, slowly, under a roof of plane trees. The towpath from Béziers to Carcassonne is flat, shaded and unhurried — three days of locks, villages and still green water, with the Pyrenees a blue line to the south.
I. Béziers and the Fonseranes locks
Begin below the cathedral at Béziers, at the staircase of nine locks at Fonseranes — Riquet’s great feat of engineering. The path runs west under the planes through Capestang and the hamlet of Le Somail, with its old bookshop barge and a bridge worth the stop.
“The canal does not hurry, and neither should you — the towpath rewards the slow.”
II. Homps, Trèbes and Carcassonne
The middle day passes the wine villages of Homps and the round lock of Trèbes, where the planes lean low over the water. The last stretch climbs gently to Carcassonne and its walled cité — a fittingly medieval end to a seventeenth-century road of water.
