Perpignan

Perpignan is the capital of French Catalonia — the Pyrénées-Orientales, known locally as Catalunya Nord — a city of 120,000 thirty kilometres from the Spanish border and fifteen from the sea.

It does not feel like the rest of Occitanie, and that is the point of coming. The street signs are bilingual, the flag on the buildings is the Catalan senyera, the food is Catalan, and for a century and a half in the Middle Ages this was the mainland capital of the Kingdom of Majorca.

The Palace of the Kings of Majorca

Built from 1274 on a hill inside the city, and one of the most important surviving Gothic palaces in southern Europe. Two chapels stacked one above the other, a great arcaded courtyard, the throne room, and Vauban’s later fortifications wrapped round the whole thing in red brick.

The kingdom lasted from 1276 to 1344 and covered the Balearics, Roussillon and Montpellier. It was absorbed by Aragon, and Roussillon passed to France only in 1659 by the Treaty of the Pyrenees — which is recent enough that the Catalan identity here never went away.

The centre

• Le Castillet — the red-brick gate of 1368, the emblem of the city, now the museum of Catalan popular arts and traditions; climb it for the view over the roofs to the Canigou
• Cathédrale Saint-Jean-Baptiste — fifteenth-century southern Gothic, with a remarkable painted crucifix called the Dévot Christ, brought from the Rhineland
• Le Campo Santo — the fourteenth-century cloister-cemetery beside the cathedral, the only one of its kind in France and the largest in Europe; used for concerts in summer
• Loge de Mer — the fourteenth-century maritime exchange on the Place de la Loge, with the Hôtel de Ville and its Maillol bronze beside it
• Musée Hyacinthe Rigaud — the portraitist of Louis XIV was born here; the museum also holds Picasso, Dufy and Maillol

The centre of the world

In 1963 Salvador Dalí declared Perpignan railway station the centre of the universe, having had a vision of cosmogonic ecstasy on the platform. He painted it, said so repeatedly, and the station now announces the fact on its façade. It is entirely serious as far as Perpignan is concerned.

Food

Catalan, not Languedocien. Look for boles de picolat (meatballs in a sauce with olives), bullinada (fish and potato stew), snails grilled on a vine-shoot fire — the cargolade — rabbit in chocolate, and Catalan cream. The wines are Côtes du Roussillon, and the sweet fortified Banyuls, Maury and Rivesaltes come from the hills nearby.

Getting to Perpignan

• By train — on the main line to Spain; TGV from Paris in about 5 hours, Montpellier 1 h 30, Barcelona under 2 hours.
• By air — Perpignan-Rivesaltes, with UK and Paris flights; Barcelona and Toulouse are the larger alternatives.
• By car — the A9 down the coast. See parking in France.

Around Perpignan

• Collioure — 30 minutes, the fishing port where Matisse and Derain invented Fauvism
• Côte Vermeille — the rocky coast down to the Spanish border, with Banyuls and Cerbère
• Canigou — the sacred mountain of the Catalans, 2,784 m, with the abbeys of Saint-Martin-du-Canigou and Saint-Michel-de-Cuxa below it
• Villefranche-de-Conflent — 45 minutes, a Vauban fortress town and one of the most beautiful villages in France
• Train Jaune — the little yellow railway up into the Cerdagne, one of the great mountain lines of Europe

When to go

April to June and September to October. July and August are very hot inland and the coast is full. The Visa pour l’Image photojournalism festival takes over the city’s historic buildings each September and is free — one of the best reasons to come.

See Occitanie and the cities of France.

Weather in Perpignan

Updated: 24 August 2026