Just beyond Le Boulou is Céret, a little town at an elevation of a couple of hundred metres above the sea.
Céret’s bridge has been attributed to the Romans, and to the devil. The round loophole, on either side of the great arch, is supposed to have been a malicious afterthought of the engineers who built the bridge to head off the evil influences of the devil who set them to the task. The application is difficult to follow, and the legend might as well apply to the eyes painted on the bows of a Chinese junk. As a matter of record the bridge was built in 1321, by whom will perhaps never be known.
Amélie-les-Bains is ten kilometres higher up in the valley of Tech, and has become a thermal station of repute, due entirely to the impetus first given to it by the spouse of France’s “Citizen King” in 1840, whose name it bears.
Bagnères-de-Luchon, or more familiarly Luchon, is called the queen of Pyrenean watering-places. If this is so Amélie-les-Bains is certainly the princess, with its picturesque ring of mountain background, and its guardian sentinel the Canigou rising immediately in front. It enjoys a climate the softest in all the Pyrenees, a sky exempt of all the vicissitudes of the seasons, and a winter without freezing.
Just north of Amélie-les-Bains is the little village of Palada. It sits halfway up the mountainside, beneath the protection of a once formidable château, to-day in ruins, its gray green stones crumbling before the north wind which blows here in the winter months with a severity that blows knots from their holes,—at least this is the local description of it, though the writer has never experienced the like. The inhabitants of the poor little village of Palada got hot-headed in 1871, when Paris was under the Commune, and had a little affair of their own on the same order.
The whole valley of the Tech, being a near neighbour of Spain, has that hybrid French-Spanish aspect which gives a distinctive shade of life and colour to everything about. The red cap of the Catalan is as often seen as the blue hat of the Languedoçian.
At Arles-sur-Tech, not for a moment to be confounded with Arles-en-Provence, is a remarkable series of architectural monuments, as well as a charming old church which dates back to the twelfth century, and a Roman sarcophagus which mysteriously fills itself with water, and performs miracles on the thirtieth of each July. Within the church are the relics of the Christian martyrs, Abdon and Sennen, brought from Rome in the ninth century. The charming little mountain town is at once an historic and a religious shrine.
High up in the valley of the Tech is Prats-de-Mollo, with its guardian fortress of Lagarde high above on the flank of a hill. This tiny fortress looks hardly more than a block-house to-day, but in its time it was ranked as one of the best works of Vauban. To keep it company, one notes the contrasting ruins of the feudal Château de Peille hard by.
The town itself is fortified by a surrounding rampart, still well preserved, with great gates and pepper-box towers well distributed around its circumference. In olden times these ramparts held off the besieging kings of Aragon, but to-day they would quickly succumb to modern guns and ammunition.
Along with its bygone attractions Prats-de-Mollo is trying hard to become a resort, and there are hotels of a modernity and excellence which are surprising for a small town of twenty-five hundred inhabitants, so far off the beaten track. In spite of this no amount of improvements and up-to-date ideas will ever eradicate the mediæval aspect of the place, unless the walls themselves are razed. Its churches, too, are practically fortresses, like those of its neighbour Arles, and the whole aspect of the region is warlike.