Circuit du Château de Cazals

Explore a bastide as you walk on the heights around Cazals. A large number of "bastides" (“bastidas” in Occitan), the New Towns of the Middle Ages, were created in the 13th C. They were planned on a regular layout, with straight streets, and more or less fortified. The founders attracted settlers by offering a contract guaranteeing them right of asylum, exemption from military service and the right of property inheritance for their heirs, for the price of a plot of building land plus a plot for cultivation. In Cazals, the Place Hugues de Salel, the regular layout of the adjoining streets and a few covered passages are the last traces of a bastide founded by the English in the early 14th C.

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