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Abstract

Located along the French coast between the towns of Narbonne and Perpignan, the fortress of Salses has defended the borders between Spain and France since 1496. Built by order of Ferdinand the Catholic, it served both as a defensive barrier and outpost for offensive military actions. With the new geographic setting that followed the Traite des Pyrenees, Salses and the territory of Roussillon finally passed to France. Once lost its strategic importance, the fortress was abandoned and risked demolition. Restored by Vauban in the XVIIIth century, it first became a military guard station, then a state prison and finally a powder keg. In 1866 it was classified as Monument National. Today, though restored and inserted in the region’s tourist routes, it is disconnected from the broader context of fortified complexes that characterize the neighboring French and Spanish coasts. Based on these premises, the paper aims to propose appropriate strategies for the conservation and especially the valorization of the fortress of Salses. At the local level, it would be necessary to assign greater importance on all historical phases of the building - enhancing their characters and documentary specificity - and to relate the fortress with the surrounding landscape and with the most important defensive and urban centers in the Roussillon. At the international level, the inclusion of the fortress in a system of similar architectural heritage is highly desirable, in order to highlight its defensive value in relation to other similar complexes located along the shores of the western Mediterranean. Only in this way the fortress of Salses, with its transformations and reconfigurations, can renew and strengthen the interrelations with the territory and the landscape and become a point of accumulation of the memory of centuries, of historical events, of the political, military and social processes of the European society. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4995/FORTMED2015.2015.1774