Canal du Midi
Seventeenth Century Canal Of About 240 Km From Toulouse To The Mediterranean, Built By Pierre Paul Riquet And Completed In 1681; UNESCO World Heritage Site Inscribed 1996 · Castelnaudary, Occitanie
The Canal du Midi runs for about 240 km from Toulouse to the Étang de Thau near Sète, linking the Garonne to the Mediterranean. It was designed and financed by Pierre-Paul Riquet, a tax farmer from Béziers, and dug by thousands of workers from 1666; Riquet died months before it opened in 1681. Its genius is the water supply, fed from the Montagne Noire to the summit at the Seuil de Naurouze, and it has dozens of locks, many of them oval, plus aqueducts, bridges and the Malpas tunnel. It became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1996. Today it carries holiday boats rather than cargo, and many people hire a licence-free cruiser for a week, moving slowly between villages. Others cycle the towpath. The canal was famous for its long avenues of plane trees, but a canker disease has killed many of them and large numbers have been felled and are being replanted, so some stretches look bare for now.
From Toulouse to the Étang de Thau at Sète; hire bases around Castelnaudary and Carcassonne, Castelnaudary, Occitanie, France
The towpath and the canal banks are open at all hours for walking and cycling. Boat traffic is limited to daytime: locks are worked by lock-keepers or by automatic controls during set hours, usually from morning to early evening with a break at lunchtime on many locks, and the hours are shorter in spring and autumn than in summer; confirm the current timetable with the waterways authority or your hire company. There is no navigation at night. Each winter, roughly between November and March, sections are closed in turn for maintenance, and hire bases generally operate from about late March or April to October or November. In dry summers, low water can restrict passage or shorten lock hours. The Fonserannes staircase at Béziers runs upstream and downstream in turns at set times, so boats may wait a long while at busy periods. Hire boats must be booked well ahead for summer, and changeover days are usually fixed; one-way trips can carry an extra charge. Museums and sites along the way, such as the Riquet exhibition at Naurouze, have their own seasonal hours.