Canal du Midi

The idea about the Canal du Midi is already quite old. The Romans and Leonardo Da Vinci had already an idea to create a canal in France. But always the same problem: overcoming the hills in the dry Languedoc province. In the seventeenth century, the pressure increased to avoid the one-month and two-thousand-kilometer-long detour around hostile Spain. The channel was eventually created by Pierre-Paul Riquet and the Italian François Andréossy in the period 1667-1680. The waterway was fed into the Languedoc area by a 30 km long feed channel. The Lac de Saint-Ferréol was constructed: the largest reservoir of that time. The canal has many other artworks, such as trap locks, aqueducts, a tunnel, etc. Therefore, it was added to UNESCO's World Heritage List in 1996. Famous is the aqueduct or "pont-canal" at Béziers, which spans the Orb.

Dromos