The town itself is fortified by a surrounding rampart, still well preserved, with great gates and pepper-box towers well distributed around its circumference. In olden times these ramparts held off the besieging kings of Aragon, but to-day they would quickly succumb to modern guns and ammunition. Along with its bygone attractions Prats-de-Mollo is trying hard to become a resort, and there are hotels of a modernity and excellence which are surprising for a small town of twenty-five hundred inhabitants, so far off the beaten track. In spite of this no amount of improvements and up-to-date ideas will ever eradicate the mediæval aspect of the place, unless the walls themselves are razed. Its churches, too, are practically fortresses, like those of its neighbour Arles, and the whole aspect of the region is warlike. The principal church, which dominates the city with its great Roman tower, is a remarkable construction in more ways than one. It is a veritable church militant, for from its great crenelated tower one may pass by an underground vaulted gallery to and from Fort Lagarde. There is no such view to be had up and down the valley and off towards the Spanish frontier as from its platform. The interior is most curious; more Spanish than French in its profuse application of gold and tinsel. A gigantic _rétable_ of the time of Louis XIV is the chief artistic accessory within. There is no carriage road from Prats into Spain, but a mule track leads to the Spanish village of Camprodon. In a little corner of the Pyrenees, between Vallespir and the valley of the Tech--where lie Céret, Arles and Prats-de-Mollo--and the valley of the Tet, around the western flank of the Canigou, is the Cerdagne, a little district of other days, known to-day only to travellers to or from Perpignan or Quillan into Andorra, via Hospitalet or Bourg-Madame. Vauban fortified the Col de la Perche on the Spanish border to protect the three districts ceded to Louis XIII by Spain--Cerdagne, Capcir and Conflent. Almost the whole of the Cerdagne is mountains and valleys; and until one reaches the valley of the Tet, at Villefranche or Prades, one is surrounded by a silent strangeness which is conducive to the thought of high ideals and the worship of nature, but drearily lonesome to one who likes to study men and manners. This is about the wildest, ruggedest, and least spoiled corner of France to-day. Nothing else in the Pyrenees or the Alps can quite approach it for solitude. Villefranche--Conflent and Barcelonnette in the Basses-Alpes might be sisters, so like are they in their make-up and surroundings. Each have great fortresses with parapets of brick, and great stairways of ninety steps leading up from the lower town. The surrounding houses--half-fortified, narrow-windowed, and bellicose-looking--stand as grim and silent to-day as if they feared imminent invasion.