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Argeles-The drawback of being too coveted…
Two dolmens confirm the presence of Man at Argelès 4,000 years ago. But the most important part of the history of Argèles stems from its central location, between the kingdoms of Aragon, Majorca and France which never stopped fighting over it.
Man has been present on the Mediterranean coast since prehistory. The problem lies in finding traces which have been spared by erosion, the rise and fall in water levels or the ruthless hands of Man.
Argèles nevertheless has two 400-year old dolmens. The "Collet de Collioure" and the "Cova del Alarb" dolmen have been classified as historic monuments since 1958.
There is then a gap of five centuries during which no traces of any village built by Man, who must undoubtedly have travelled through to fish, trade, wage war…, have been found. It was only during the famous "Year One Thousand" that the name Argèles is mentioned for the first time as a village. A written document from 981 indicates that the town belonged to the Abbey of Saint Génis des Fontaines and that there was a fortified town belonging, like the rest of Roussillon, to Borell II, Count of Barcelona and descendant of Count Wilfred the Hairy.
There then followed a second period of which little is known. Argelès disappeared from official documents until 1258, and the Treaty of Corbeil. It fixed the border between France and the kingdom of Aragon, to which Argelès belonged. When James the Conqueror, King of Aragon died in 1276, his kingdom was divided in two, one half for each of his sons. Peter IV of Aragon, the elder, succeeded his father on this side of the coast while his younger brother was given the kingdom of Majorca. But the elder saw red and did not accept the division of the lands, which lead to quarrels. This finally stopped and they signed an agreement in 1279, which they confirmed in a treaty… twenty years later in 1298. But they nevertheless waged war against each other for forty-five years! Argèles, which was situated on the border, continuously suffered collateral damage. The situation came to an end with the victory of Peter IV of Aragon who recaptured the town in 1343 and all the kingdom of Majorca a year later.
But the troubles of the inhabitants of Argelès were not over yet. Barely a century later in 1462, the new King of Aragon, John II, signed a treaty of alliance with the King of France, Louis XI. Its objective was to subdue the ongoing rebellions from the Catalans of Barcelona. The King of France lost the battle and – you never can tell what goes through a King’s mind – invaded his ally’s Roussillon as a reprisal. In 1472, the King of Aragon gave the Roussillon back to the King of France. Argelès was now officially part of France. The treaty of Barcelona of 1493 confirmed the return of the Roussillon to France.
Did this mean the end of the wars? Not by a large stretch of the imagination Sir! Crowned heads continued to covet this border region. The war between Spain and France resumed for another thirty years, from 1618 to 1648. The treaty of the Pyrenees, which was signed in 1659, was supposed to put an end to the war. But as expected Argelès continued to be attacked by Spain which "liberated" it in 1793, and two years later, it was again "liberated" by the French. The inhabitants of Argelès would undoubtedly have preferred to have been liberated less often and left in peace…
This was indeed the case for nearly one hundred and forty years until the beginning of the Spanish civil war. During the winter of 1939, thousands of Spanish people fled Francisco Franco’s dictatorship to take refuge in France. This was known as the Retirada, the withdrawal. The French authorities were caught unawares and were quickly snowed under by the scale of the phenomenon. They opened camps which were modestly called "rounding up" camps on the beach under the supervision of soldiers. The refugees were literally penned in. They lived in appalling conditions and many died. These camps represent a painful memory in the region’s history. Even more so as they were used again in 1940 for the Tzigane population when the government of Vichy, adopting stiffer laws against the gypsy community, organised its internment and transportation. Today a monument can be seen on the precise site of the camp to commemorate these dark times of the history of Argelès.
