The Canal du Midi, dug entirely by hand and hailed as an engineering marvel upon its completion in 1681, offers a refreshing alternative to French travel: a cycling route through the cities and landscapes of the country’s south. Crossing Occitanie, the canal gives cyclists of all skill levels access to parts of France that are rich in history, but are sometimes passed over by visitors with (only) Paris on their minds.
When I discovered that the channel was manageable for non-serious cyclists like me, I was hooked. The 150-mile waterway stretches from the city of Toulouse to the Mediterranean port of Sète and offers mostly flat cruising for the thousands of riders who take to its towpaths each year.
For almost a week in July, I cycled upstream from Sète to Toulouse. I rented an electric bike and other equipment from Paulette, a rental company that focuses on canal tourists. The rental was about $400. I also took advantage of the group’s extremely convenient luggage delivery service. This lightened my load to take in the canal, its large and small towns and its historic undercurrents. I wanted to see its famous écluses, or oval-shaped locks, and the idyllic country scenes on the road. I didn’t really plan ahead – as a beginner, I didn’t know how far my legs could take me. Given my fluid schedule, I opted to find accommodation through the canal’s plentiful tourist offices after arriving wherever I chose to stay for the night.
Up a canal on a rented bike
The road from Sète starts from the sea. The former fishing town, where I took my bike as well as the side bags for the essentials I didn’t send afterwards, ranks as a low-key favorite among French and foreign visitors. I pedaled southwest out of town on a Saturday morning, the sparkling Mediterranean to my left.
Starting at one end of the original canal helped me appreciate the ambition of the waterway’s visionary builder. Pierre-Paul Riquet, born in nearby Béziers in the early 1600s, conceived the Canal du Midi as a single section of the Canal des Deux Mers — a “canal of two seas” — linking the Mediterranean to the Atlantic and running from Sète. as far as Bordeaux.
The union of the two coasts would open up a profitable alternative trade route for sailing around Spain and Portugal, and develop French internal trade in the process – notably for the region’s salt, wheat and wine. But how do you build a body of water from scratch? Riquet’s “communication canal,” as he called the complete project, would draw water to flow south from the Montagne Noire, in the central highlands of France, and north from the foothills of the Pyrenees mountains bordering Spain.
After years of planning and an early, self-financed demonstration project, Riquet convinced King Louis XIV to support the Canal des Deux Mers, with the Canal du Midi terminating at Toulouse and the Canal de Garonne running northwest from there. It would become the largest construction zone in 17th century France, after Versailles.
My first day on the canal, after 28 miles and an embarrassing handful of wrong turns, I stopped for the night in Villeneuve-lès-Béziers, in the middle of Europe’s ‘Cerberus’ heat wave. The town, heavy on Spanish influence, organized a bull festival, with an event that ran the animals down the main street. The stop showed me cultural cues from France’s neighboring borders — an exchange the Canal du Midi has accelerated for three and a half centuries.
In the footsteps of Thomas Jefferson
Picking up the canal the next morning, I crossed 24 miles of vineyards, sunshine and more heat. If I was free in a literal sense, I was also of the mind not to push too, too hard, without firm plans for accommodation, given the holy weekend hours of a French summer Sunday.
At noon I stopped at Le Somail, a small village that once served as a stopover for canal travelers. Above a stone bridge made with flowers, I noticed a plaque honoring Thomas Jefferson. The founder traveled the canal as part of a three-month trip through France and Italy, stopping at Le Somail in May 1787. In his notes from the trip, the 44-year-old Jefferson expressed a preference for solo travel. “One travels more usefully when one travels alone, because they reflect more,” he wrote. I was hoping for my own little dose of Jefferson’s musings.
The tourist office at Le Somail, with a surprisingly well-made adjacent exhibit on the canal, recommended the bed-and-breakfast Le Neptune, a few hundred meters away. Run by Dirk and Inge Demeulenaere—a retired Belgian couple who spoke Flemish to each other between conversations with guests—Le Neptune provided tasteful 19th-century digs with funky modern accents, like Beatles posters and a beaded screen that looked like Salvador Dalí. The couple served me breakfast in their lush outdoor courtyard and then saw me off personally. I was glad to stop at Le Somail, both for the Jeffersonian surprises and the unexpectedly sweet hospitality I received.
Castles and Cathars
The 34-mile drive from Le Somail to the next major city, Carcassonne, brought the most challenging terrain of the trip: hills, rough gravel, and large stretches narrowed by weeds and overgrowth. In places the canal doubled back, winding hairpins through fields and flying off raised waterway embankments, stopping faces and spikes. Despite the hard slog, arriving in Carcassonne and the medieval castle from which the city has enjoyed centuries of fame made the difficulty worthwhile. The castle towers proved as dizzying as the day’s 99 degree high.
A pre-Roman settlement in France, Carcassonne expanded during the 12th and 13th centuries through massive fortifications, a response to wars between the kingdom of France and outsiders such as the Albigensians and Aragonese. The medieval walled city, whose old town is still inhabited, benefited from significant conservation efforts in the 19th century. The result obliges every castle cliché, with ramparts that look like teeth and towers with roofs shaped like witches’ hats. Costumed tour guides enhance the effect.
The development of the castle of Carcassonne also stems from the city’s role as a flashpoint in the religious history of southern France, particularly through the Cathar religious movement, considered outside the bounds of traditional Catholicism. The 13th century led to tensions between the Cathars and the local Catholic populations, resulting in sieges and executions throughout the region. Carcassonne and its castle were among the Cathar strongholds before the French kings gradually absorbed the area into their sphere of control. I left Carcassonne with a new understanding of French history and places far outside the more touristy zones of the country.
A quest for cassoulet
The next day required a shorter 25 mile drive to the town of Castelnaudary. I was motivated to get there quickly: “Castell,” as the locals call it, is home to cassoulet, France’s signature casserole of pork, duck, sausage, and steamed white beans. Between a lock keeper outside the town and the attendants at Castel’s tourist office, a restaurant called Chez David was recommended twice in an hour. I knew where I was going for lunch.
The restaurant’s head chef, David Campigotto, could be called the Guy Fieri of cassoulet: with a rock ‘n’ roll aesthetic of piercings, tattoos and a goatee, his style is bold with his gastronomy. I arrived at the restaurant as loud blues music was playing from the overhead speakers. Pictures of guitars hung on the walls. Each table’s water jug was a repurposed bottle from Kentucky’s Bulleit bourbon distillery.
When my cassoulet arrived, the waiter ran through a well-polished summary of the dish’s process and ingredients. Even before cooking begins, he said, the beans are soaked in broth overnight. The pot is then matured in the oven for six hours — “at least,” Mr. Campigotto told me, in a chat after my meal. The meats and beans simmer in their own juices and bring the dish to a cohesive and metaphorical unity of flavors. The chef and some of his staff travel to Chicago most years for events with prominent local chef and restaurateur Paul Kahan. Mr. Campigotto said he loves the city, where he plays the role of gastronomic diplomat to many Chicagoans. He travels with his own beans.
To the “Pink City”
Leaving Castelnaudary, the bike felt heavier. (Or was it just the chasuble?) I slogged through fields of sunflowers and cooler weather on my last day, combined with a quick ride on the train—the regional lines accommodate bikes and weary cyclists—for the final 39 miles to the Toulouse. Along the way lay a geographical wonder: the Nauruzi Trough, the dividing point between the Atlantic and Mediterranean watersheds. There, about 600 feet above sea level, the water flow of the Canal du Midi changes directions. A feeder stream from the Montagne Noire keeps the water even on both sides. The last lock Before Naurouze is the écluse de la Méditerranée. the first after that, the écluse de l’Océan, meaning the Atlantic. In this way the Canal du Midi captures a sense of the geography of France and its breadth, between two seas.
Toulouse, France’s fourth largest city, nicknamed the “Pink City” for its red stone and brick buildings, is often overlooked, perhaps because of its distance from Paris. For cyclists from the canal or elsewhere, Toulouse is an extremely cycling city: dedicated cycle lanes run everywhere, with a myriad of signs and arrows to help. Paulette’s Toulouse office accepted my bike earlier than scheduled with no charge or questions asked.
Now without a bike, I took Toulouse for its sunny—and indeed, pink—glow. The narrow rue Saint-Rome welcomed pedestrians with brick facades and pastel-painted shutters. The Place du Capitole housed restaurants and large cafes and had an outdoor market on the day I visited. The Capitole building itself, with its red stones and white columns, houses the mayor’s office as well as the Toulouse Opera House.
Walking through the city that evening, I saw in a state of happy weariness the brilliant Capitol and other buildings. Toulouse and the sights from my start in Sète made cycling the Canal du Midi worth every pedal mile.
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