The Cathar stronghold — three-towered castle above a mountain town where Ariège cuisine, cave art, and the last Cathars converge
Foix is the capital of the Ariège — a small, wild département of the French Pyrenees, the least visited corner of southern France, where the Cathar Wars of the 13th century left a castle on every hilltop and the mountain cuisine is built on duck, foie gras, charcuterie, and trout from cold Pyrenean streams. The Château de Foix (three towers on a sheer rock above the town) is the most dramatic medieval castle in France's southwest. Nearby Niaux Cave has one of the finest Palaeolithic cave painting galleries in Europe (alongside Lascaux and Altamira), open to small groups by timed reservation.…
The Counts of Foix were among the most powerful lords of medieval Occitania and fierce defenders of the Cathar heretics against the Albigensian Crusade (1209–1229). Roger-Bernard III of Foix allied with the last Cathars; the county only submitted to French royal authority in 1290, and even then maintained strong autonomy. The Ariège's Palaeolithic cave art tradition (Niaux, Mas-d'Azil, Le Portel) dates to 14,000–10,000 BCE and represents one of the highest concentrations of Ice Age art in Europe. The Ariège became a département in 1790 and was historically one of the most economically isolate…