Albi

Why go

Albi is built of brick, and at sunset the whole town glows red above the river. Its cathedral looks like a fortress from outside and a jewel box within, every surface painted. Then there is Toulouse-Lautrec, born here, whose Paris of cabarets and brothels hangs in the bishops’ palace of his home town: the perfect way to see Montmartre without going near it. Small enough to walk, lively enough to stay a few days.

History

Albi stood at a crossing of the Tarn long before its first stone bridge, the Pont-Vieux, was built in the eleventh century; it is usually dated to the 1030s or 1040s and is still in use. Toll revenue and trade along the river helped the town grow, and the bishops became its lords.

The town gave its name to a whole heresy. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries Cathar Christianity spread through Languedoc, and the crusade preached against it from 1209 became known as the Albigensian Crusade, even though Albi itself was not its centre. The bishops who emerged victorious made sure their power was visible.

In 1282 Bishop Bernard de Castanet began a new cathedral in brick, plain-walled and massive as a fortress, and the fortified bishops’ palace, the Palais de la Berbie, grew beside it. The cathedral of Sainte-Cécile was consecrated in 1480. Its later bishops filled it with colour: a huge Last Judgement at the west end at the end of the fifteenth century, a lace-like stone rood screen, and between 1509 and 1512 vaults painted by artists from northern Italy.

The Renaissance brought new wealth from pastel, the woad plant that gave Europe its blue dye before indigo, and merchants built brick mansions such as the Hôtel de Reynès. In 1864 Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was born into an aristocratic Albi family; after his death his mother gave much of his work to the town, and the museum opened in the Palais de la Berbie in 1922. The Episcopal City of Albi was inscribed by UNESCO in 2010.

UNESCO World Heritage: Episcopal City of Albi (2010)