Foix. A night visit between history and local legends

Foix by night, between History and local legends: this is, roughly speaking, the proposal that the guide lecturer Mélanie Saves makes to tourists, but also to residents wishing to discover their city in a new light. Or rather at dusk.

Because it is when evening falls that Mélanie has chosen to tell the epic of the count’s city, where great history mingles with local tales and legends.

The latter, which she distils along a one-and-a-half-hour journey through the streets of the city center, allow her “to lighten a visit which conveys a lot of historical information”. Year after year, Mélanie finds new ways to make her visits fun and renew the interest of regulars. Even if it means becoming a storyteller or an actress.

But its core business remains history and heritage. And the town center of Foix is ​​rich in it. And it has the advantage of concentrating several centuries of urban evolution in a very small space, which makes the visit steep and all public.

Mélanie Saves thus relates the founding of the city by the first Counts of Foix, from the 11th century, the progressive construction of the castle and the village, the different districts which have structured the life of the inhabitants, the old markets and fairs, the religious life around the Saint-Volusien church … As well as the turn of the XIXth century, with its teachers of the Republic in training, and finally the nascent XXth century and its brand new grain halls, in the purest Parisian style of the time.

“This helps to better understand town planning”, explains the guide, who also focuses on the topographical specificity of the city: “It is located in a cluse, a valley carved 80,000 ago by an old glacier, in a geological folding. This is a textbook case for geographers! “