The focal point is the market square, often missing its covered halle nowadays, but generally still surrounded by arcades, while the church is relegated to one side. They are nearly always square or rectangular in shape and are divided by streets at right angles to each other, producing a chequerboard pattern. The other defining feature of a bastide is its layout. Taxes and judicial affairs, meanwhile, remained the preserve of the representative of the king or local lord under whose ultimate authority the bastide lay. The charter might also offer asylum to certain types of criminal or grant exemption from military service, and would allow the election of consuls charged with day-to-day administration – a measure of self-government remarkable in feudal times. All new residents were allocated a building plot, garden and cultivable land. The bastides provided a handy way of securing the land along the frontier, and it was generally at this point that they were fortified.Īs an incentive, anyone who was prepared to build, inhabit and defend the bastide was granted various benefits in a founding charter. But as tensions between the French and English forces intensified in the late thirteenth century, so the motive became increasingly military. They were a means of bringing new land into production – in an era of rapid population growth and technological innovation – and thus extending the power of the local lord. That said, the earliest bastides were founded largely for economic and political reasons. Although they are found all over southwest France, from the Dordogne to the foothills of the Pyrenees, there is a particularly high concentration in the area between the Dordogne and Lot rivers, which at that time formed the disputed “frontier” region between English-held Aquitaine and Capetian France. There is also one chilling monument to wartime atrocity: the ruined village of Oradour-sur-Glane, still as the Nazis left it after massacring the population and setting fire to the houses.īastides, From the Occitan word bastida, meaning a group of buildings, were the new towns of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The wartime Resistance was very active in these out-of-the-way regions, and the roadsides are dotted with memorials to those killed in ambushes or shot in reprisals. Others, like Figeac, Villefranche-de-Rouergue, Gourdon, Montauban, Monflanquin and the many bastides (fortified towns) that pepper the area between the Lot and Dordogne, have a quieter, more local charm, where the greatest pleasure lies in wandering the narrow streets of their old towns. Some, like Sarlat and Rocamadour, are so well known that they are overrun with tourists in the height of summer. The charm of the area undoubtedly lies in the landscapes and the dozens of harmonious small towns and villages. Hilltops through the region are marked by splendid fortresses of purely military design, such as Bonaguil, Najac, Biron, Beynac and Castelnaud, which more than compensate for the dearth of luxurious châteaux. The other great artistic legacy of the area is the Romanesque sculpture, most notably adorning the churches at Souillac and Beaulieu-sur-Dordogne, but all modelled on the supreme example of the cloister of St-Pierre in the quiet town of Moissac. And in these caves – especially in the valley of the Vézère around Les Eyzies– is some of the most awe-inspiring prehistoric art to be found anywhere in the world. Where the rivers have cut their way through the limestone, the valleys are walled with overhanging cliffs, riddled with fissures, underground streams and caves. The other characteristic landscape is the causses, the dry scrubby limestone plateaux found between the Lot and Dordogne and the Lot and Aveyron. But you can travel a long way without seeing a radical shift, except in the uplands of the Plateau de Millevaches, where the rivers plunge into gorges and the woods are beech, chestnut and conifer plantations. The northerly Limousinis slightly greener and wetter, the south more open and arid. From Limoges in the province of Limousin in the north to the Garonne valley in the south, the country is gently hilly, full of lush hidden valleys and miles of woodland, mainly oak.
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