On a recent trip to the Midi region in southern France, I took  the time to explore a special place: the famous Canal du Midi in the area known as Languedoc/Roussillon.  This manmade waterway is a wonder of hydraulic engineering, and its entire length has been designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Here are a few facts about the Canal du Midi. It was built during the reign of Louis XIV by a wealthy individual called Pierre Paul Riquet. It was dug by some 12,000 workers using only raw manpower. (Backhoes and front loaders didn’t exist in those days.) It was conceived to enable the transportation of goods between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, as a shortcut to a lengthy voyage around Spain and Portugal through the Strait of Gibraltar.

The southeastern part of the waterway, 130 miles between Toulouse and Marseillan (near Sète), used to be called the Canal Royal du Languedoc. The northwestern section, about the same length between Toulouse and Castets (near Bordeaux), was formerly known as the Canal Lateral à la Garonne because it runs parallel to the Garonne River. The full length, once completed, was first named the Canal des Deux Mers (the Canal of the Two Seas), but the entire system is now commonly known as the Canal du Midi.

Today there is virtually no transportation of goods on the canal. Instead, it is used almost exclusively by self-driven pleasure boats and luxury barge-hotels. As I said, it is an amazing piece of engineering, and as it lazily winds its way through vast areas of vineyards and olive groves, it is one of the loveliest and most peaceful waterways in France.

The most striking feature of the canal, in my opinion, is what I would call its “signature look” - tall rows of enormous plane trees lining both banks, arching high above the waterway and shading its entire path all the way down to the deep blue Mediterranean. Imagine floating gently down the nave of a leafy Gothic cathedral for miles on end! Also notable is the ubiquitous tow path where horses once pulled the freight barges and where one can now take leisurely walks, jogs or bicycle rides.

During this one-week trip, I only covered the southeastern section of the canal. I traveled up and down between Carcassonne and Marseillan on the Bassin de Thau. I visited a dozen places, met quite a few people and took a lot of pictures. You can get more details on my visits from the full article I posted on our website.

One fairly rare but interesting feature of canal cruising in France is crossing over a river on a “pont-canal” (literally “bridge-canal” but sometimes translated as “navigable aqueduct”). A pont-canal is like a regular bridge except that it carries water instead of a road. As your barge floats across the bridge, you can look down at the river below - quite a sensation!

In Burgundy, I took some pictures of the Pont-Canal de Briare, a beautiful bridge across the Loire River. This structure is 20 feet wide and nearly a half mile long. The water is 7 feet deep. The bridge was completed in 1896 by Gustave Eiffel, whose famous Eiffel Tower in Paris was built in 1889. The nearby Canal de Briare was built much earlier (between 1604 and 1642) as part of a massive network of waterways connecting the Mediterranean Sea to the Atlantic Ocean and the English Channel.

There is another pont-canal in the south of France near Beziers, where the Canal du Midi crosses the river Orb. In that location, the Orb riverbed is at the bottom of a deep gorge, and its waters flow fast and furious on their way to the Mediterranean. Originally, a series of 9 staircase locks were built to bring boats down to the level of the river. This did the job for a while, but the lower two locks kept being flooded by the river. So, a “navigable aqueduct” was built to bypass these two locks. (The seven others are still in use today and are known as the Fonséranes locks.)