Explore Perpignan

The Castillet is a brick fortress gate built around 1368 to defend a new entrance in Perpignan's town walls; the smaller Porte Notre-Dame was added beside it in the 1480s. Later a state prison, it has housed the Casa Pairal, a museum of Catalan folk arts and traditions, since 1963, and its turret gives a view over the city and the Roussillon plain.

Perpignan Cathedral is a southern Gothic church begun in 1324 under King Sancho of Majorca and consecrated in 1509; it became a cathedral in 1602, when the bishop's seat moved from Elne. Its single nave is 80 metres long and 26 metres high, and an 18th-century wrought-iron bell cage crowns the tower. The Campo Santo cloister-cemetery adjoins it.

The Palace of the Kings of Majorca is a Gothic fortified palace on a hill in Perpignan, begun in 1276 by King James II of Majorca after he made the town his capital. Around its courtyards are the royal apartments, the great hall and a two-storey chapel; from the 16th century French and Spanish engineers enclosed it in the walls of a citadel.

Oniria is a public aquarium on the harbour front of Canet-en-Roussillon, opened in 2021 to replace the town's aquarium of 1983. Its 83 tanks hold more than 3,500 animals of 660 species, arranged in ten themed areas that follow water from the Canigou summit down to the deep sea, among them a tropical jungle and a shark zone.