Canal du Midi

The canal was opened officially as the Canal Royal de Languedoc on May 24, 1681. It was built under the supervision of Pierre-Paul Riquet, a rich farmer who ruined himself in the personal undertaking and died broke in 1680, some months before the canal was opened to navigation. 12,000 workers toiled for fifteen years to create the canal. The canal required 103 locks to climb and descend 190 meters, and included 328 structures, including bridges, dams and locks and a tunnel. At Bezier it bridges the river Orb as the pont-canal. The canal design included the first canal passage ever built through a tunnel, 173 meters long under a hill at Enserune. It also involved the first artificial reservoir for feeding a canal waterway — a massive dam, 700 meters long, 30 meters above the riverbed and 120 meters thick at its base, which was built by the labor of hundreds of local women carrying soil in baskets.

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The Canal du Midi is a 240km long canal in southern France, le midi, linking the Garonne River to the Mediterranean Sea, between Toulouse and the Mediterranean port of Sete, which was created for the canal. The original purpose of the canal was to avoid over 2000 km trips around hostile Spain between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean Sea, which required a full month of sailing in the 17th century.

The Canal du Midi forms, with the Canal Latéral à la Garonne, a waterway (the Canal des Deux Mers) between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea. It has been on the UNESCO's list of World Heritage Sites since 1996.