Talk:Villefranche-de-Conflent

(Village vs. town)

The article talks as though the town (NOT village) was built within a castle: completely untrue. It was one of the many towns and cities fortified by Vauban, as that article shows - ie that the original village walls were strengthened to give the citizens of the town greater protection against attack by local rebels. I have visited the place, but know little else about it, although the article here gives a great deal more. I am sure someone can make a better stab at it than at present! Peter Shearan 06:04, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

Confluence?

Should "Conflent" be replaced by "confluence" in the following sentence?

The town is tightly packed within the original castle walls and is bounded on one side by the road running up into the Cerdagne and on the other by the Conflent of the rivers Tet and Cady.

Unimath (talk) 05:40, 10 November 2008 (UTC)

   Short answer, no. Longer answer, thank you for the careful copy editing in the visible portion of your edit, and you deserve credit also for "saying something when you saw something".
   If Conflent and confluence have an etymological relationship, it is probably irrelevant to the 'graph in question. On the other hand, an IP who produced that wording probably was confused by the similarity of the two words -- perhaps especially by seeing the French article which IIRC says that VfdC is in the Conflent, and at the confluence of the two rivers! Add to that the fact that it's in the Conflent, at the Conflent's common boundary with the Cerdagne....
   I'm gonna go work on making that passage, to which you quite rightly objected, make sense.
--Jerzy•t 04:35, 15 July 2012 (UTC)

OK, i found

The town is tightly packed within the original castle walls and is bounded on one side by the road running up into the Cerdagne and on the other by ... the rivers Tet and Cady.

I think someone already noted that the fortified town is walled, but not with "castle walls". (Even tho a castle-like fort does look down on it. From the north, FWIW.)

Thots:

1. "[T]ightly packed within"? If it's tightly packed, it's bcz there's hardly any level ground around there, which is neither here nor there, until there's any reason for anything bigger than a single farm to be there -- i.e. until someone moved in a military/industrial complex based on military and political planners' assessments of the cost of maintaining x number of boots on the ground in the mountainous terrain vs. the ability to disrupt invasions before more economically productive territory was disrupted or conquered. Talking about being tightly packed inside the walls invites the viewpoint of an uncritical tourist, and i avoided that juxtaposition, instead giving info about how this town differs from, say, Versailles.
2. And contrary to the intimation of the town being further hemmed in by the N116, the Google street view suffices to show that the hillside was cut into in modern times (and the road apparently relieves the town of cars by providing a place outside the walls to park them): surely the road was built without further restricting the town. In fact, getting hikers across the two-lane highway didn't cause anyone to build a pedestrian bridge over it, any more than has been done across the four-laner that separates Square Ledge from the facilities at Pinkham Notch. And in further fact, the original decision to push the wall southward to ground that steep is more likely to have been a means of reducing the mobility of potential besiegers than of providing more space inside.

Bottom line: until there's a ref, N116 neither bounds, nor obstructs access. And if the town is more tightly packed than anyplace else, the location rather than the walls does that... except in the sense that perhaps there wouldn't be all those tourists and shops "packed" in but for the walls -- bcz the tourists and shops would go away if the walls weren't there for the tourists to flock to.
--Jerzy•t 01:14, 16 July 2012 (UTC)