At the extreme south of the Massif Central, dominating the Thoré valley, stands the Montagne Noire. The name of this granite relief, straddling the Aude and the Tarn, immediately evokes a mysterious imagination. It is to the thick forest coat that covers it that the mountain owes its dark side. Beeches, firs, chestnuts and bald cypresses grow happily in well-irrigated soil. Because the Black Mountain catches the clouds in their path, which pour regular rains from the Atlantic and maritime entries from the Mediterranean.
Numerous natural watercourses surround the slopes of the relief, garnished here and there by beautiful foliage of royal osmonda. Into the massifs rushes the Autan wind, an Occitan blow also called the “devil’s wind”, whose gusts make the trees oscillate. It is in the heart of this captivating national forest that the Canal du Midi is born, a waterway linking the Atlantic Ocean to the Mediterranean, or at least its sources. Few know it, but this large artificial canal built from 1667 to 1681 has a natural genesis.
To find this starting point, you have to go up to the Alzeau catchment, located on the border between Aude and Tarn. At an altitude of 680 meters, it is from this first stream whose water is captured and then diverted that the Mountain channel is born. A channel imagined by Pierre-Paul Riquet, builder of the Canal du Midi. A fine connoisseur of the region, “Riquet understood very quickly that the hydrographic network of the Montagne Noire was so rich and so regular that it could supply the canal in all seasons. It remained to convince King Louis XIV and his minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert of the effectiveness of his project.says Samuel Vannier, archivist of the Canal du Midi.
To illustrate his point, it disappears behind the shelves full of old documents, carefully stored at the Saint-Etienne port, in Toulouse. These old maps which bring to life the first traces of the Mountain channel have the smell of humidity of old parchments. In 1665, to remove the last reluctance of the people of Languedoc who denigrated his project, Riquet proposed to build at his own expense a small “test pit”. The first attempt is conclusive, his idea works: it is indeed possible to divert the natural waterways of the Montagne Noire to supply the future canal.
From 1667, five years were necessary to dig the two channels imagined by Riquet, that of the Mountain then that of the Plain, which since the capture of Alzeau finally lead to the canal. Since 1996, they have been classified as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, in the same way as all the works of the Canal des “two seas”. “From Alzeau to the Seuil de Naurouze, where the Canal du Midi is born, the water, thanks to the channels, will travel around 70 kilometers in around forty hours”, relates archivist Samuel Vannier.
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