On the Toulouse-Nice main train line, 25km west of Béziers, is NARBONNE , once the capital of Rome's first colony in Gaul, Gallia Narbonensis, and a thriving port and communications centre in classical times and again in the Middle Ages. Plague, war with the English and the silting-up of its harbour finished it off in the fourteenth century, though a tentative prosperity returned in the late nineteenth century with the birth of the modern wine industry. Today, despite the ominous presence of the Malvesi nuclear power plant just 5km out of town, it's a pleasant provincial city with a small but well-kept old town, dominated by the great truncated choir of its cathedral and bisected by a grassy esplanade on the banks of the Canal de la Robine.

In the summer of 1991 Narbonne acquired notoriety as a new flash point in France's continuing problems with its ethnic minorities, as the Harkis - Algerians who had enlisted in the French forces and fought with them against their own people in the Algerian war of independence in the late 1950s - began angrily to protest official neglect of their community. The discontent has rumbled on, the most recent manifestation being a sit-in outside the Mairie during the winter of 1997