The Town Where I Live - Villefranche de Rouergue

Villefranche de Rouergue has been my chosen home now for about two years and I feel already that I belong here and have absolutely no thoughts of moving. It is a small town of 11 thousand people, less than it had in the mid-nineteenth century, probably its peak period.
The town was founded in the late thirteenth century as part of a project of those in power at the time to create a series of small, fortified towns called Bastides. There are many of these all over the south-west of France, many called Villefranche, hence the need to add to the name. The Rouergue is the name of the area in which the town is situated, once a political area of which the town was the capital.
At the time the town was created, the south-west was in ruin after the Cathar Wars which had created chaos throughout the region. The idea of the Bastides was to create safe places where the scattered artisans and other trades people could install themselves and bring a network of centres of trade and commerce to the region.
Villefranche was in an area of many activities which could develop and expand due to the protection of the town. These included the mines up and down the Aveyron valley and the agricultural activities up on the plateaus above the town. These diverse activities meant that the town had a growing commercial importance which developed these commercial activities into veritable industries in the 18th and 19th centuries with the development of mills up and down the river.
The old Bastide which is the centre of the town still exists in its medieval street plan, a warren of mainly narrow, mainly cobbled streets, all going outwards from the central cathedral square to what were the gates of the walled city in a Roman geometric fashion. The walls have now all disappeared but the streets have not been changed, still retaining the names given to them because of the activities which happened in them in the past like Hammer Street where I lived before, the noisy part of the town where workers hammered copper into vessels of many sizes.
Although a serious fire in the fifteenth century destroyed most of the houses, they were rebuilt on the same sites and most of the houses/buildings in the town date back to that period. We can see they used a framework of wooden beams and large rocks from the quarries around the area and roman tiles on the roofs. As we wander around the town today, a thing that remains striking is the covered arcades around the cathedral square and some of the amazing old doorways still used to get into the buildings. Also, most of the buildings had a business on the ground floor with family living in the two floors above this with a further floor for housemaids and apprentices.
These days the old town is a mixture of immigrants, a large part of the French population having moved out to modern bungalow and houses on the slopes of the valleys surrounding the town. We have the different waves of immigrants: from Spain and Portugal, from the North African nations, Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, and more recently, from Mayotte and Reunion, French controlled islands to the south of Africa. Plus of course, people like me, people who have decided to retire here from GB, the USA mainly.
Tourism has become the main industry these days and it receives its fair share of tourists, mainly just passing through and staying a couple of days but also some who use it as a base to visit the surrounding area which is beautiful and quite diverse with a lot of chateaus and abbeys to visit.
I have posted here a load of photos to give you an overall picture of the town.