The oldest city in Languedoc — Canal du Midi, the Great Massacre of 1209, the féria de Béziers, and where Languedoc's most underrated wines are grown
Béziers is one of the oldest cities in France — the Roman Baeterrae, a wine-trading town since at least 625 BCE — set on a hill above the Orb river and the Canal du Midi in the western Hérault. It is associated with two epochal moments: the first city sacked by the Cathar Crusade in 1209, when the papal legate allegedly ordered 'Kill them all, God will know his own' (now doubted, but the massacre of 20,000 people was real), and the birthplace of Pierre-Paul Riquet (1609–1680), the tax farmer who built the Canal du Midi (UNESCO, 1996). The Béziers Féria in August is one of the great bullfighti…
Baeterrae was a Gaulish oppidum turned Roman colony, one of the oldest cities in Gaul. On 22 July 1209, the army of the Albigensian Crusade besieging the city offered to spare it if the Cathars inside were handed over. When the inhabitants refused to surrender their neighbours, the army massacred the entire population regardless of faith — one of the first systematic uses of mass terror against a civilian population by a European Christian army. Riquet's Canal du Midi (1666–1681), connecting the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, was the greatest engineering feat of 17th-century Europe and made B…