City - history

The birth of the town of Arles on Tech merges with that of the abbey Sainte Marie, first foundation bénédictine in Catalonia at the first times of the Reconquest (778-780) which sees the first and rare successes of Charlemagne in addition to the Pyrenees.

With the reading of the oldest known texts, it seems that the first abbey was born in the same walls of the Roman thermal baths of Arles (current Amélie Baths).

The extraction of iron in the high valley of Riuferrer (river of iron) was already a protohistoric, decisive activity in all cases as of before the first hours of Roman colonization. The abundance of the shards of potteries sigillée and remains of amphoras spread in the old sewage farms of slags showing it amply.

Until the French revolution the monks granted concession and forest minings to the ironmasters installing their workshops of cast iron and forging on the same sites of extraction of iron and especially of production of coal on the wooded slopes (ore going in general with the meeting of coal). It is starting from the XIII° century that the forging mills were established close to the rivers, where water fall and diversion canals ensured the operation of the low hearths and the powerful hammers of forging.

The industrial calling multiséculaire of Arles found its origin thus. Moreover, It will be necessary to wait until 1880-1881 to see High Vallespir finally opening with the currents of the industrial age. Vallespiriens will launch out then in the economic adventure with ardour. Ten and twenty years later, the creation of the railways will devote and reinforce this dash.

As of the middle of the XIXe century, the train with vapor on railway facilitates the economic expansion and stimulates competition. The military hospital of Amélie the Baths, hydrotherapy, the ore of Batère and Pinouse, the exploitation of the chestnuts plead for the creation of a line of general interest in Vallespir. It is only on January 4 1879 which the public Ministry of Labour decides the layout Elne it Boulou-Amélie-Arles Le first train with vapor arrives at Arles on June 26, 1898.

The Sainte-Marie abbey.

The primitive establishment was born into 778, in the ancient walls of the Roman thermal baths of the Baths of Arles (Amélie Baths). The monk founder, Castellanus, from Spain found here refuge with his small community bénédictine, at the moment even where Charlemagne conquered this southern fringe of Septimanie until there to the hands of Arabic. Protections imperial and comtale allowed an extension of the landed property of the abbey and its undeniable spiritual radiation. The transfer in 881 on the current site follows Norman confusion which has occurred a few years earlier. Arles offers the rare example in Catalonia of a building reversed with Western bedside and frontage turned to the raising sun. The second characteristic is the presence, inside, of two apses. With the opposite of the principal ch?ur, three apses were dug in the wall of frontage; the central apse, in platform above the entry, presents a decoration with frescos, datable of XIIème century