Five-star hotel in Aigues-Mortes, the Camargue's walled town

Aigues-Mortes hotels: a crusader port in the marshes

Aigues-Mortes is a commune at the southern tip of the Gard, in the Occitanie region, set among the lagoons of the Petite Camargue. Its history begins with a king who wanted a harbour. In 1240 Louis IX, later Saint Louis, had no Mediterranean port of his own: Marseille belonged to his brother Charles of Anjou, Agde to the Count of Toulouse and Montpellier to the King of Aragon. He obtained the site and the surrounding land from the monks of Psalmody Abbey by an exchange of properties, and exempted the inhabitants from the salt tax.

It was from here that Louis IX left for the Seventh Crusade in 1248 and for the Eighth in 1270, when he died in Tunis. The sea then withdrew as the delta advanced; Aigues-Mortes, built as a coastal port, now lies about 5 km inland, linked to the Mediterranean by the channel to Le Grau-du-Roi and since 1806 to the Canal du Rhône à Sète.

Aigues-Mortes hotels therefore mean staying inside the town Saint Louis made his port. At its centre, Place Saint-Louis faces the main gate, the Porte de la Gardette, and holds James Pradier's 1849 statue of the king. The Gothic church of Notre-Dame-des-Sablons, probably built before the ramparts, has had stained glass by the contemporary artist Claude Viallat since 1991.

The ramparts and the Constance Tower

The walls run for 1,640 m around the town, and the Centre des monuments nationaux, which manages them, calls them one of the best-preserved ramparts in Europe. Louis IX did not live to build them: work began two years after his death under Philip III the Bold, continued under Philip the Fair, and was completed at the very end of the 13th century or the beginning of the 14th. The curtain walls rise about 11 m and are almost 3 m thick, while the towers and gates reach about 18 m.

The layout still shows what the town feared and what it wanted. The north front, facing the land, has only two large gates, the Porte de la Gardette and the Porte Saint-Antoine. The south front, protected by the lagoon, opens through five gates to the old port, among them the Porte des Galions, the Porte de la Marine and the Porte de l'Arsenal. On the east, the Queen's Gate led to the road to the royal saltworks of Peccais.

The Constance Tower, built between 1240 and 1248, is the survivor of Saint Louis's castle, which burned down in 1421. It is a cylinder 22 m across and 37 m to the top of its lighthouse, with walls 6 m thick, and a fire burned in its metal lantern to guide ships. In 1307 Philip the Fair held Templars here. From 1686, after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, it served as a prison for Protestants, most famously Marie Durand, held from 1730 for 38 years, who is credited with carving the word REGISTER, "resist" in Occitan, on the rim of the upper room's oculus. The terrace, 26 m up, looks over the town, the canals, the salt works, the architecture of La Grande-Motte and the Pic Saint-Loup.

Hotel Villa Mazarin, a 15th-century house within the walls

Hotel Villa Mazarin is at 35 Boulevard Gambetta, inside the ramparts. The hotel describes a fully restored 15th-century house with traditional Provençal decoration in surroundings that are both historic and contemporary, and says the building was already receiving guests in 1538, when the emperor Charles V and Francis I met at Aigues-Mortes. The Atout France register lists 25 rooms. Each room has its own colour scheme; Luxury rooms measure 32 to 45 m², Prestige rooms 32 to 50 m², and suites start at 42 m².

Facilities include an indoor swimming pool that opens onto the summer garden, a jacuzzi, a sauna and a hammam, spa treatments by appointment, a fitness room with cardio and weight equipment available around the clock, and a sports coach on request. The gastronomic restaurant and bar serve cuisine devised by the chef Cyril Labadie and his team, as of 2026.

The hotel is open all year, with reception and concierge staffed 24 hours a day and round-the-clock room service. For what the classification involves, our guide to what makes a hotel five-star in France explains the French classification.

The salt marshes and their pink water

Salt made Aigues-Mortes before the crusades and after them. In antiquity an engineer named Peccius organised sea-salt production here, giving his name to the Peccais marshes, and Benedictine monks of Psalmody worked the salt from the 8th century. In 1856 local owners joined a Montpellier merchant to found the Compagnie des Salins du Midi, today the Salins group, whose Salin d'Aigues-Mortes produces La Baleine salt.

Sea water pumped into the salt works travels more than 70 km through channels called roubines, its salt concentration rising from 29 to more than 260 grams per litre, before the salt is harvested and piled into glittering heaps called camelles. Ten saltworkers still manage the movement of the water according to gusts of wind, storms and salinity. In summer, when the wind drops, crystals form on the surface and are harvested by hand as the Fleur de Sel de Camargue.

Visitors see the site from a small tourist train on a tour of more than an hour among the salt tables and pink waters, with a climb onto a camelle for a view over the salt works and the town. The Salins group says the Aigues-Mortes salt marsh can host more than 15,000 greater flamingos, with hundreds of chicks born each year, and keeps the breeding areas closed as a sanctuary; the visit site counts 200 bird species, 157 of them protected. The salt works also have a darker history: in August 1893, Italian workers of the company were killed by French villagers and labourers in the massacre of Aigues-Mortes.

The Camargue from the Gard side

The Camargue proper lies between the Rhône's main branches, the Grand Rhône to the east and the Petit Rhône to the west, mostly in the Bouches-du-Rhône around Arles, Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer and Port-Saint-Louis-du-Rhône. West of the Petit Rhône, a further expanse of marshy plain in the Gard is known as the Petite Camargue, and Aigues-Mortes sits on its far western edge. For travellers comparing hotels in the Camargue, that difference matters: Arles is the base at the head of the delta, near the Parc naturel régional, while Aigues-Mortes looks towards the salt works, the Gard lagoons and the beaches of Le Grau-du-Roi.

The landscape is protected at several levels. The commune includes Natura 2000 sites such as the Petite Camargue laguno-marine, which records more than 240 bird species and is a regular nesting site for more than 50 of them. The IGP area of Camargue rice covers the Camargue gardoise and the Petite Camargue as well as the delta proper.

In the neighbouring commune of Saint-Laurent-d'Aigouze, on the road north, the Tour Carbonnière guarded the obligatory passage through the marshes to Aigues-Mortes; Louis IX had it built as a watchtower. A text of 1346 calls it the key of the kingdom in this region, and its terrace, built to carry artillery, gives a panoramic view over the Petite Camargue.

Beaches, feast days and the seasons

Seaside tourism has shaped the coast south of Aigues-Mortes since the 1960s, with the building of La Grande-Motte and the extension of Le Grau-du-Roi and Port-Camargue. Le Grau-du-Roi was itself part of Aigues-Mortes until it became a separate commune in 1879. Its eastern end is the Pointe de l'Espiguette, a vast protected natural area of dunes around the Espiguette lighthouse, built in 1869; according to Villa Mazarin, the beach there is about fifteen minutes away.

The town's great feast is the Fêtes de la Saint-Louis at the end of August, with re-enactments of combat, parades in medieval dress, coin striking, medieval music and fireworks over the ramparts. The seasons of the salt works set another rhythm: the salt marsh is a feeding and breeding ground of prime importance for the birds that stay through spring and summer, and the salt itself, in the Salins group's own words, is born of the sea, the sun and the mistral.

Getting to Aigues-Mortes

Aigues-Mortes is about 35 km by road from Nîmes and about 30 km from Montpellier. Its railway station is on the regional liO line between Nîmes and Le Grau-du-Roi; from Paris, high-speed trains reach Nîmes in about 2 hours 50 minutes. According to the hotel, Nîmes, Montpellier, Uzès, Orange, Arles and Avignon are all within an hour's drive, which makes a Camargue stay easy to combine with the Roman and papal cities of the Rhône valley.