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The Canal du Midi is an outstanding piece of French engineering. Dating from the 17th century, it was the genius of Paul Riquet which made it possible, allowing a continuous passage of waterborne traffic between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea.

Many people had previously planned a canal to link the Garonne River at Toulouse with the Mediterranean, but no-one had been able to overcome the problem of water supply at the point of the watershed, the line dividing rivers flowing to the west from those flowing to the east. For although a canal essentially has no current, water is needed to feed the locks which allow the waterway to climb and descend as it must, as it is rarely possible to keep a canal completely flat along its whole course.

Riquet, from Beziers, had amassed a personal fortune as a tax collector in pre-revolutionary France. His plan was for a canal which would hug the southern edge of the Massif Central, trying to maintain as near as possible a horizontal course as it rounded a long series of spurs and crossed the many tributary valleys. Previous plans had come to grief in the area west of Carcassonne known as the Lauragais, where the canal would cross the watershed, for Riquet realised that west of there all water would naturally flow westward, while to the east it would flow in the opposite direction. This upper part of the canal must be fed at all seasons if the project was to succeed.

What he did was to build a reservoir in the hills behind the Lauragais which, to this day, feeds the canal at its highest point, thus ensuring sufficient water all year round for the many locks along its course.

There was another problem for Riquet, however, and that was the lack of official financial backing for his scheme, so he determined to go it alone, using his own considerable wealth. The canal's completion in 1681 proved the accuracy of all Riquet's calculations, but left him bankrupt, leaving his descendants to try to recoup some of the losses during their lives.

The canal was a valuable asset for trade, particularly for the grain and wine industries. With the Languedoc region, still the largest continuous wine growing area in the world, at its eastern end, and Bordeaux, of international repute, at its west, this was a natural conduit for wine traffic. Nowadays, although the canal is still complete in its engineering and tree-lined splendour, it provides routes for holiday traffic, and many ports and depots have developed along its course at which

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