A kingdom born and gone in under a century
In 1276, on the death of James I of Aragon, known as the Conqueror, his realm was split between his sons. The younger, James II, inherited a territory straddling the Pyrenees: Roussillon, Cerdanya, the Balearic Islands and part of Languedoc. He turned it into a kingdom in its own right, with Perpignan as its capital, and began building the Palace of the Kings of Majorca on the Puig del Rei hill, now inside Vauban's citadel walls.
The Kingdom of Majorca did not outlive its founders: by 1344 it had already been reabsorbed into the Crown of Aragon. But the palace remained: a courtyard of honour, a two-tier Sainte-Croix chapel, the Majorca hall, the whole complex ranking among the largest civil Gothic palaces still standing in Europe. The ramparts surrounding it today, though, belong to a very different century: those are the ones Vauban added after 1659, the year Perpignan permanently changed hands.
That 1659 shift, the Treaty of the Pyrenees, ended centuries of allegiance to the Crown of Aragon and then Spain. The Castillet, a fortified brick gate built in the 14th century and the only surviving piece of the old medieval walls, had already seen plenty of changes of power before that one. Now a museum of Catalan traditions, it remains the city's most recognisable symbol.
Just behind the cathedral, a much quieter place tells another side of that religious history: the Campo Santo, a 14th-century funerary cloister, is one of the only cemetery-cloisters of its kind still preserved in France. Its white marble arcades, long forgotten, have since found a new life as an exhibition and performance space, without ever losing their stillness.
II. CultureRigaud, Dalí, and an identity that never gave in
In 1659, the very year Perpignan became French, the city saw the birth of a child who would become one of the great portraitists of his age: Hyacinthe Rigaud. He built his career in Paris and painted Louis XIV's official portrait, becoming the court's go-to painter. The museum that now bears his name, housed in a 17th-century mansion, brings his work together with pieces by Maillol, Picasso and Dufy.
Three centuries later, another painter left his mark on the city without ever having lived there. In 1965, Salvador Dalí claimed to have experienced one of his most intense visions here and described Perpignan's train station as a place of unusual energy, almost a centre of the world. The story, now marked by a plaque at the station, has become a lasting piece of local folklore.
What never faded, on the other hand, was Catalan identity itself. The sardana, a traditional circle dance, still draws crowds to Place de la Loge during aplecs, and the Visa pour l'Image festival, a world reference in photojournalism since 1989, anchors the city in international current affairs every September without ever making it drop its Catalan accent.
That identity has its grave side too. On Good Friday, the Procession de la Sanch sees hooded penitents, the caperutxes, parade from the Saint-Jacques church in a medieval ritual held without interruption since the 15th century. Perpignan remains one of the few cities in France where this public penitence tradition, born in Spain, has survived unbroken to this day.
From the citadel to a market that feeds a continent
A logical visit starts with the Castillet and the Cathédrale Saint-Jean-Baptiste, a short walk from each other, before pushing on to the nearby Campo Santo for the breathing room its silent cloister offers. The Loge de Mer and the Hôtel de Ville, where Maillol's La Méditerranée sits in the inner courtyard, complete this triangle of medieval merchant and political power, before climbing up to the Palace of the Kings of Majorca for an overview of the city.
For neighbourhood life, the early-morning Place Cassanyes market remains the best glimpse of working-class, Catalan Perpignan, while the Promenade des Platanes and the Miranda gardens offer a shaded break just below the Castillet. Parc Sant Vicens, further south, surprises with its monumental fresco trail, one of the largest open-air street art collections in the south of France.
Finally, on the edge of the city, the Saint-Charles international market is worth a mention more for what it represents than for a visit itself: Europe's largest wholesale fruit-and-vegetable market, a logistics hub that has fed tables across the whole continent since 1970 and that has, more quietly than the palace or the cathedral, built modern Roussillon's wealth.