The Château et remparts de la Cité is run as a national monument, with current opening hours and ticketing on its own site. Hours shift with the season and the last admission is well before closing, which catches people out in winter when the gates shut early.
The walk takes you along a stretch of the inner rampart with the outer wall below and the lists between them. It is the only way to get the sense of scale that the ground-level lanes flatten out, and the only way to see how the two rings were meant to work together.
Allow ninety minutes for the castle and the walk together, more if you read the panels. The route is uneven underfoot in places and there are stairs and narrow spiral sections, so it is not fully accessible and the site says so plainly.
The view from the western end back over the Aude and across to the Bastide is the one photograph everybody takes, and it is better in the late afternoon when the light is behind you rather than in your face.
If you are here for several days, do this on your first morning. Everything else in the Cité makes more sense once you have seen the layout from above.
