Aigues-Mortes: Saint Louis's Walled Port, the Tour de Constance and the Pink Salt Pans

Required Activities

• Climb the Tour de Constance to the salle des chevaliers and find the word REGISTER — resist — cut into the kerb of the well and still legible, credited to Marie Durand, shut in here at 19 and let out 38 years later; look up in the guard room below at the dome in twelve segments on its slender columns, then go out on the terrace to the iron cage on the watch turret, 13th-century ironwork that held the fire that guided ships in

• Walk the full circuit of the walls on the rampart walk and from the north side pick out the Tour Carbonnière standing alone out in the marsh, the watchtower that guarded the only road in — then work out from up there why the town is called dead waters, and why its people once asked Saint Louis to give it a better name

• Ride the little train out through the salt pans of the Salin d'Aigues-Mortes and work out the sequence: which basins are still sea water, which have gone pink as the salt-loving micro-algae take over, and which have crystallised out white — finishing at the camelles, the mountains of harvested salt

• Find the memorial in the town to the Italian salt workers killed here in the massacre of August 1893, and read how a dispute in the salt pans outside the walls turned into a lynching in the streets inside them