Immediately to the west of the Minervois is the town of Carcassonne with the fantastic medieval Cité up on the hill overlooking the modern town. The survival of this medieval town which figured so prominently in the anti-Cathar crusades, is largely due to the work of Viollet-le-Duc. Well worth a visit but beware in the height of the tourist season, July and August, it is very busy.

For the golfers amongst you, there is a very nice club at Carcassonne which accepts visitors at reasonable rates and they have clubs to rent.

During the early summer each year, Carcassonne is host to the 'Festival de Carcassonne', a wonderful mix of plays, concerts, opera and dance. This year, the festival commences on 30th June, 2000, and events run through to 29th July, 2000.

130 km west from Olonzac and about an hour and three quarters by road is the town of Toulouse. Toulouse has a history dating at least from Roman times and during the medieval period was the seat of the Count of Toulouse, a major player in the political history of the south-west of France. The almost pedestrian way, Rue St Rome, follows pretty well the old north-south axis of the Roman town and contains wonderful old buildings associated with the elected capitouls who were allowed to build their towers above the normal building line as a sign of their prestige. However, they were discrete enough to build back from the building line and some of their towers remain to this day.

Today, Toulouse is home to the Airbus consortium and the largest manufacturing unit where the A330 and A340 aircraft are assembled can be visited on a guided tour. An exhibition center for space exploration is conveniently situated just off the eastern ring-road. Toulouse is also home to the European Space Agency.

Between Toulouse and Carcassonne, about 12 km on the Toulouse side of Castelnaudary, is the Seuil de Naurouze with its oblisk erected to the honour of Paul Riquet, the engineer who built the Canal du Midi. Naurouze is the watershed - to the west, the waters flow towards the Atlantic and to the east, they flow towards the Mediterranean. The genius of Riquet was to bring a stream from the Black Mountain to Naurouze to enable the Canal du Midi to be provisioned with water and thus enable the solution of a problem which had existed for centuries and which had prevented the joining of the Atlantic to the Mediterranean Sea by a waterway.

The Canal du Midi has recently been classified as a World Heritage site. A large section of the Canal flows through the Minervois and you can follow it all the way to Toulouse.