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The spa town of Ornolac-Ussat-les-Bains lies in the French Pyrenees 15km south of the county town of Foix. From the Rue des Thermes, or Bath Street, a path climbs diagonally across a steep hillside, forcing its way through prickly vegetation until the gradient becomes so severe and the drop from the path so sheer that some kind person has fitted metal posts and a wire handrail. At the foot of a towering limestone cliff, the first man made walls emerge from the undergrowth. The path turns sharply through the remnants of a stone gateway, passes a cave the size of a sentry box, and makes a double dogleg through the ruins of a barbican. From here, a few more paces lead on to a sandy area the size of a couple of tennis courts. Look up, and this unusual bailey is sheltered from rain and shine by the roof of a natural porch 20m high. This monumental porch ends at a buttress whose central part appears to have been faced with masonry, but in its centre an arched doorway leads to the innermost recess of this bizarre castle.
Through the threshold, seven wooden steps descend into a cavern shaped like a railway tunnel, large enough to house a locomotive, but too short to include the carriages. At its far end, a full-length window in the rock overlooks the Ariège valley. The road to Andorra and Spain is close enough for a watchman to identify friend from foe.
As is so often the case in this place, there is nothing military about the most recent signs of human activity. Candles have left trails of red wax on the rock walls and their stubs hide in nooks and crannies. A potted rose withers by the window. Near the wooden steps, a massive slab of rock lies flat on three round stones, resembling an altar. On its upper surface, red soil and marguerite daisies have been arranged to resemble the Occitan cross, or the cross of the Cathars.
From the early 19th century to the present day, fortified caves like Ornolac have excited the imagination of many types of visitor. There have always been those who try to link these fortifications with the prevalence of religious beliefs known as the Cathar heresy in this area during the 12th and 13th centuries. Even the first few generations of archaeologists who explored them were often motivated by similar legends. But, first, we should explore the story of the creation of these fortified caves, and explain the origin of their name: spoulga.
The origins of spoulgas
A couple of kilometres north of Ornolac, several valleys converge at Tarascon-sur-Ariège. From the mid-11th century, the counts of Foix developed this town into a centre of trade and commerce protected by walls and a castle. Between the 12th and 14th centuries, they fortified at least 30 natural cavities in the cliffs around the town. Although they are not unique to the Ariège, nowhere else in the world can boast of so many spoulgas in such a small area. Ornolac and a handful of other fortified cavities have been marked as ‘spoulgas’ on 1:25,000-scale maps since the 1950s, but the word is absent from all the main French dictionaries. Few outsiders have heard of them.
The earliest written record of their existence is in an oath made by the Count of Foix and his son in Toulouse in 1213. This lists 17 castles and 6 fortified caves, all within a 15km radius of Tarascon. The Latin text of the oath uses the Occitan word cauna to describe the fortified caves, but during the course of the 13th century their name changed to spoulga, probably derived from the Latin spelunca, meaning ‘cave’. The presence of so many spoulgas in this part of the Ariège valley is explained by a combination of geology and geography.
The mountains around Tarascon contain several caves renowned for their prehistoric art, including Bédeilhac and Niaux, and a cavern that claims to be the largest in Europe – the Grotte de Lombrives. These, however, are the survivors. This part of the valley is rich in limestone, and, over a period of millions of years, water carved out caverns and passages. Then, during the various Ice Ages, glaciers gouged out the Ariège valley and its tributaries. Eighty thousand years ago, the ice was more than 500m thick, and, as it slid through the valley, it carried away numerous cave systems, leaving behind only porches and shallow cavities stranded high in the rocky cliffs.
Guarding the high road
Of all the valleys leading from southern France into the Pyrenees, the Ariège contains the greatest concentration of man-made defences. The reason for all these fortifications is simple: this is the shortest route from Toulouse to Barcelona and other parts of Spain. Throughout history, the Ariège was an artery rather than a front line, and it runs through the middle of what was, from the early 11th century until the French Revolution, the county of Foix. To control this highway and the valleys leading off to either side, the counts of Foix built a network of fortifications. As well as deterring potential enemies, these were intended to provide reassurance and protection, both for the permanent population and for traders and other travellers in this part of the Pyrenees.
During this period, the counts of Foix had stronger ties with the lords to the south of them than to the north. In their oath of 1213, the count and his son were renewing their allegiance to Pedro II, King of Aragon and Count of Barcelona. As well as placing all their possessions under Pedro’s authority, they pledged to obey any orders that he, the Pope, or the Catholic Church might give them, even though they were at that time actively resisting the Albigensian Crusade that had been launched to suppress the Cathar heresy.
Low-cost and impregnable
Visit any of the spoulgas today, and the attraction of these locations to military engineers is obvious. Compared with a traditional castle, a cave could be fortified more quickly and more cheaply because the roof and three of the walls were usually formed by natural features. In the same cliff as the Spoulga d’Ornolac, there is another fortified chamber, part of a vast cave complex called the Grotte des Églises. Here, the Count of Foix’s men built defensive walls at each end of a tunnel 60m long, and 70 joist pockets chiselled into the rock show that this was among several spoulgas that provided multi-storey accommodation.
Today, some of the more conventional fortifications built by the counts of Foix are particularly eye-catching, such as their own castle with its three towers in the centre of Foix. In contrast, now that they are shrouded by trees and other vegetation, even the larger spoulgas can be difficult to spot from the road. When they were built, however, visibility was a key consideration, because they primarily served as a deterrent and a statement of power. And they appear to have been effective, because there is no record of a spoulga being besieged. According to Guillaume de Puylaurens in his 13th-century chronicle of the Albigensian Crusade, the Count of Foix even felt strong enough to defy the King of France and attack one of his armies, because ‘He was able to count on the location of his castles which crowned the rocky summits and which he judged impregnable.’
As well as being challenging to attack, the more inaccessible spoulgas must have been impractical for anything other than temporary occupation by the defenders, and most of them had been abandoned by the end of the 13th century. At around the same time, Ornolac was enlarged and strengthened, but there is no evidence of regular occupation of any spoulga after the 14th century. They crumbled away and were largely forgotten until a fascination with Cathar legends inspired an early archaeologist to start exploring them.
A pioneering archaeologist
Adolphe Garrigou was born in Tarascon-sur-Ariège in 1802, and he died there in 1893. During his long life, he became a successful industrialist, politician, and the author of several books about Pyrenean history. In 1822, he was one of the first people to carry out archaeological excavations inside the Grotte de Lombrives. Among his finds was a stele engraved with a five pointed star. He also explored the spoulgas of Bouan, Les Églises, and Ornolac, where he made other discoveries including a bronze plate decorated with a dove and a pentagram engraved in the rock. Garrigou knew these symbols were associated with the Cathars, and they inspired him to become a treasure hunter. To understand what he was seeking, we need to return to the age when the spoulgas were built.
The house of Foix was among the fiercest opponents of the Albigensian Crusade against the Cathar heresy (1209 to 1229), and the count and his son were memorably involved in the massacre of 6,000 Crusaders at the Battle of Montgey in 1211. Many of their vassals were also involved in the heresy, and at the Château de Lordat, there was even a separate Cathar cemetery. In 1212 and 1213, the Crusaders launched raids in the northern part of the county. They mounted unsuccessful sieges of the castle in Foix, too, and of another fortress 20km to the east: Montségur. Thirty years later, Montségur was still a Cathar stronghold. Its capture in 1244, followed by the burning of 224 heretics, marked the end of organised resistance to the French Crown and the Catholic Church.
What intrigued Adolphe Garrigou was the whereabouts of the fabled Cathar treasure. Between the surrender of Montségur and the mass burnings, there was a 15-day truce that had allowed a handful of Cathar faithful to slip out of the castle. One story claims they were then able to recuperate their treasure which, as a precaution, had been hidden in a cave somewhere around Montségur before the siege. What that treasure may have been, and what was done with it by the escapees, became the source of many legends, often involving the Holy Grail. Thanks to his archaeological discoveries, Garrigou believed the Cathar survivors had hidden it somewhere else in the mountains around Montségur or Tarascon-sur-Ariège. Despite several decades of searching, he failed to find it.
Rather than regarding Garrigou as a fantasist, we should perhaps view him as a pioneer. He had no textbooks or teachers, because he was active at a time when archaeology as a scientific discipline was in its infancy. Instead, he was an educated man whose curiosity led him to investigate the history of his neighbourhood. Even his better-trained successors make mistakes, and one amusing mix-up was inadvertently caused by Garrigou himself.
A couple of kilometres downstream from his home town is a river crossing known as Devil’s Bridge. As well as inspiring stories of satanic involvement in its construction, the appearance of this bridge convinced many visitors of its medieval origin. These included historians from the Ministry of Culture who, in 1950, classified it as a monument historique because they believed it had been built by the counts of Foix at a similar time to the spoulgas. In 2010, and after more diligent research, a local historian produced evidence that proved the bridge had been built by Adolphe Garrigou in 1836 to enable his brother-in-law to test an innovative design of water wheel.
Underground journalism
In his twilight years, Garrigou acquired a young disciple. Born in 1877, Antonin Gadal quickly absorbed the knowledge and beliefs of his elderly neighbour. After Garrigou’s death, Gadal spent much of his time exploring the mountains around Tarascon – above and below ground – and immersing himself in Cathar mythology.
In 1930, it was Gadal’s turn to share his obsession with a youthful acolyte. Otto Rahn was a German who was already well-versed in the history and legends of Catharism. He believed his own family was of Cathar descent, and he came to the Pyrenees to pursue his investigations. In the same way as Heinrich Schliemann had used Homer’s Iliad to help him find Troy, Rahn believed that medieval texts such as Eschenbach’s Parsifal would help him locate the Holy Grail.
Together, Gadal and Rahn pursued the treasure hunt. Two years later, they took a journalist – Alex Coutet – to visit the Spoulga de Bouan. This is another large and easy-to-reach spoulga 2km upstream from Ornolac. Alex Coutet’s article appeared in the main regional newspaper – La Dépêche – on 16 May 1932, and it provides an intriguing insight into the mindsets of the two treasure-hunting archaeologists.
Beneath the headline, ‘After Montségur, what became of the treasure?’, Coutet explained that he came to Bouan because he had heard efforts were being made to find the treasure of the Cathars. He described Otto Rahn as a young and devoted speleologist, and a fellow writer and journalist. Monsieur Gadal was a local historian for whom these caves held no secrets. These two guides told him that, at Montségur, they were searching for walled-up entrances to secret passages, but at Bouan, they could freely circulate at will.
Coutet did not feel quite so free as he explored the spoulga. He found he needed flexible knees and a supple back to slip through the galleries, some of them vertical like chimneys, others low and tight like the entrance to an oven. Gadal told him this location was carefully chosen by the Cathars because all the approaches in the valley were guarded by other castles or spoulgas, and the heretics were able to rely on the tolerance of the counts of Foix.
Coutet then explained how, despite this security, the inhabitants chose to fortify several cavities at Bouan. He reported being extremely impressed by the gigantic defensive works that had been built at the entrances to these caves, or even encrusted in the vertical cliff, with their postern gates, lookout points, and crenellated terraces. This masonry work would resist any attack, he claimed, being built with the famous Cathar mortar, the secret of which had been revealed to them by God.
Publishing such a fanciful article in the leading newspaper of south-west France was inevitably going to attract even more adventurers to explore spoulgas like Bouan. Otto Rahn went one better. He brought the story to the attention of the Nazis.
Fabricating archaeological evidence
The following year, Rahn drew on his Pyrenean research to write a book, Crusade against the Grail. It has been translated into several languages, including English, and it is still in print. When the French edition came out later in 1933, Rahn was accused of plagiarism and poor research, preferring to frequent those obsessed by Cathars and the occult rather than serious historians and departmental archives. Nevertheless, the German edition found its way into the hands of Heinrich Himmler. Presumably the head of the SS was impressed, because he personally invited Rahn to join his organisation as a civilian historian and archaeologist. To be fair to Rahn, he was an unenthusiastic Nazi. As he later commented to a friend, ‘What was I supposed to do? Turn him [Himmler] down?’ He resigned from the SS in February 1939, and three months later his decomposing body was found in the Austrian Alps, officially the result of suicide.
Undoubtedly, Rahn’s book reinforced the fantastical beliefs surrounding the caves of the Ariège valley, and so did the tall tales he told Alex Coutet about the Spoulga de Bouan. During their visit, Otto Rahn led Coutet into a water cistern and told him to examine the coating. And Alex Coutet duly described a sort of reddish cement, polished like marble and just as hard, seemingly intact and completely waterproof even after all these centuries. He asked, ‘Who can tell the secret of this coating?’ We know the answer: it was made by adding crushed terracotta to lime mortar, and the Romans had introduced this technique to Gaul a thousand years before the Cathar heresy appeared.
Further along the cliff, Coutet was shown the spot where, according to Rahn, the Cathars had set up their home and kitchen. There, he reported, the rock had been blackened by smoke; in the area where they met to say their prayers, the smooth walls preserved strange inscriptions, and the ancient Roman writing, with abbreviations that are difficult to decipher, are further complicated by obscure Cathar symbols.
Coutet should have viewed this graffiti with a less-trusting eye. In Crusade against the Grail, Rahn was able to interpret these mysterious writings because he had carved them into the walls himself, or so several of his contemporaries alleged.
Modern archaeology
Fortunately for modern archaeologists, the counts of Foix built many more spoulgas than the six they named in their oath of 1213. Perhaps the other two dozen that have been identified more recently were omitted because they had not yet been built, or perhaps, being smaller, they were judged too insignificant to pledge to the King of Aragon. They are certainly harder to reach, which is why they escaped the attention of the treasure hunters.
Most of these sites have been identified by an archaeologist and historian who lives nearby. Florence Guillot is also an accomplished speleologist and rock climber, which is why she was able to reach these otherwise inaccessible fortifications. Having been largely untouched since the day they were abandoned, they have provided some valuable data on the role of spoulgas. These recent studies and excavations have been officially sanctioned or funded, and carried out professionally.
For example, research at the Spoulga de Niaux in 2021 found hundreds of fragments of pottery, which collectively point towards a century or so of occupation starting from the mid-12th century. Other finds suggest it was the permanent home of a family of rank rather than a garrison of lowly soldiers: they include copper-alloy buckles and buttons, a gold-plated fastener, and a double-sided comb carved from bone.
The persistence of Cathar myths
We have already noted that the spoulgas listed in the oath of 1213 provided excellent observation posts and were clearly visible to passing travellers. Unmissable from the road, well-documented, pledged to the Catholic Church – these spoulgas where Garrigou, Gadal, and Rahn went searching for their Holy Grail were anything but secret when Montségur fell in 1244. They make unlikely hideouts or prayer rooms for some of the last Cathars, but myths can be astonishingly persistent.
A couple of hundred metres to the south of the Spoulga d’Ornolac stands the Galaad (or Galahad) Monument. Its inscription translates as: ‘The triple alliance of the light: Grail, Cathar, and Rose Cross.’ There is also a year – 1957 – and that is when Antonin Gadal became the founding president of the French branch of a religious organisation called ‘La Rose Croix d’Or’, or ‘The Golden Rosycross’. Since then, this group has held several conferences at Ornolac-Ussat-les-Bains, and its four-day convention in 2012 attracted 2,500 members from 40 countries who slept in tents and were drawn by the mythical links between the Cathars, the Holy Grail, and the fortified caves of the Ariège. And that is why, in the larger spoulgas such as Ornolac, you are far more likely to find a makeshift cross, or even a potted rose, than anything of archaeological value.
Colin Duncan Taylor (2026) The Pyrenees: a human history is published by Yale University Press (ISBN 978-0300287196, 384pp, 14 colour illustrations and one map, £25).
All images: courtesy of Colin Duncan Taylor
