The Brienne Canal to the Bazacle

Ponts Jumeaux

Where three canals meet under twin 18th-century bridges.

You're standing where three canals meet. The Canal du Midi sets out for the Mediterranean from here, the Canal de Garonne heads west toward Bordeaux, and the Canal de Brienne drops away toward the Garonne, its whole 1,560-meter course lying ahead of you. That short canal is the spine of this walk, and it is inscribed with the Canal du Midi on the UNESCO list of 1996. The twin bridges ahead were built in 1771 and 1774, and between them stands a long relief in Carrara marble carved by François Lucas between 1773 and 1775.

It has been a listed monument since 1967. Look beyond the marble and you'll see what a late-1970s ring road did to this junction: a line of traffic that cuts straight across the old canal basin. The double row of plane trees that lines the water earned the Arbres remarquables de France label in 2017.

Bassins des Filtres

The 1842 basins that settled the Garonne's mud.

You're looking at a piece of plumbing, and that's the whole point. These basins were dug in 1842 to clean water. The Canal de Garonne needed a steady supply, and the river it drew from came down full of mud. So the water was held here, in these wide, shallow basins, long enough for the silt to settle to the bottom before the clear water ran on into the canal.

The shape does the work: wide and slow, giving the current no chance to carry its load. For more than a century this was the canal's filter, a quiet machine of water with no moving parts. It stopped filtering last century, when the canal's needs changed and the basins were left to become what they are now, a sheet of still water behind the trees. The Garonne still runs brown after rain, and standing here you can see exactly the problem the engineers of 1842 set out to solve.

Le Gros Arbre

A guinguette under an old cedar beside the filter basins.

The house in front of you was the keeper's, from the days when someone lived beside these basins and watched the levels every day, and the tree towering over it gives the place its name. This is Le Gros Arbre, a guinguette under an old cedar beside the filter basins. A guinguette was an open-air spot where people came to drink and dance by the water, and this one still keeps that habit alive. The cedar above it has grown wide enough to hold the whole terrace in its shade, and the tables run down to the edge of the water. It keeps guinguette hours rather than cafe hours, so check before you count on a drink here. This is the point on the walk where the water stops being infrastructure and turns into something people use, and twenty minutes under the big tree is a fair way to take that in, with the basins in front of you the way they have been since the engineers filled them.