- Location:
- The village of Tautavel is a medium-sized town located in the Verdouble valley, 1/2 hour from Perpignan.
- It is known worldwide for having on its territory the Caune de l'Arago, a prehistoric cave that housed the oldest known European, 450,000 years ago.
- Prehistory and Antiquity:
- Tautavel is therefore the village from which we can go back to the highest in local history, but also in the whole of Europe.
- At that time, the Verdouble valley was rich in game and fruit shrubs, it was a place of choice for our distant ancestors.
- Origin of the village:
- Tautavel appears for the first time in a document written in 1011 under the name of Taltehull.
- In 1012 the count Bernat Taillefer gave his son Guillem the "Castellum de Taltevull", a donation confirmed by the count's will in 1020. The castle was mentioned in 1070, then disappeared from the archives. It is of course this castle which will give birth to the village, at that time the houses were agglutinated against its walls to be as close as possible to the castle protection. The chapel of the castle also served as a parish church.
- Nowadays there are still scattered walls of this initial village, it is on the eastern slope of the hill on which the castle was built.
- Tautavel today:
- The village of Tautavel today is very different from that of just twenty years ago. The discovery of the man from Tautavel led to the construction of the Prehistory Museum, and with it an important financial windfall. Many housing estates have emerged, the city has acquired the latest equipment (gymnasium, conference hall, etc.). Also worth mentioning is the Moretti wall, a grandiose work by an artist who has highlighted the skull of the man from Tautavel through a monumental painting.
- The heritage of Tautavel is of course very rich. There is the cave of Tautavel, the museum of prehistory and the museum of the first inhabitants of Europe, but also the Saint-Génis church and its furniture, the chapel of Saintes-Puelles, the remains of the castle, the torre del far, as well as the Visigothic sarcophagi.
