it’s a neighbour who says so, the olive trees around here have existed for more than 10,000 years. And this neighbour knows what he’s talking about, with his 4,500 centuries of experience, he’s called “homo erectus” or more familiarly – don’t forget he’s a neighbour, he only lives 10 miles away – “Tautavel Man”. His descendents in neolithic times also lived around here as shown by the vestiges discovered in Castelmaure in the grandiose Laval valley, not very far from the ruins and vineyards of the Villa Imbreces, which is situated on the site of what is now the village of Embres and above all the castrum that the Romans built to protect the frontier, the antique fita (limit), against invasions and smugglers.
Castelmaure, the border, the southern frontier in the times when the Kingdom of France ended here, that is also what is portrayed by the jagged walls of the nearby Aguilar fortress – it has since been promoted to the status of “Cathar Castle” – and the stone stumps of the old castle under whose shelter the village of Castelmaure was founded in about 1070. On the summits of the serre, there also remain old lookout towers and the traces of a Jewish village pushed back there by the Reconquista.
A moving relic of this shock between cultures, the belfry-wall of the pre-Romanesque chapel of Saint-Félix still stands with its Mozarab arches perpendicular to the tombstones of the Pompadours, the former lords of the manor, well before the two villages were brought together under the name of Embres & Castelmaure.