St. Girons is without any remarkably interesting monuments, though the town is delightfully situated and laid out and there is real character and picturesqueness in its tree-lined promenade along the banks of the Salat. Originally St. Girons was known as Bourg-sous-Ville, being but a dependency of St. Lizier. To-day the state of things is exactly reversed. In the twelfth century it came to have a name of its own, after that of the Apostle Geronius. In the Quartier Villefranche, at St. Girons, on the left bank of the Salat, is the Palais de Justice, once the old château of the seigneurs, which architecturally ranks second to the old Église de St. Vallier with its great Romanesque doorway and its crenelated tower like that of a donjon.
St. Lizier, just out of St. Girons on the St. Gauden's road, is one of the mediæval glories which exist to-day only in their historic past.
Its château, its cathedral and its old stone bridge are unfortunately so weather-worn as to be all but crumbled away; but they still point plainly to the magnificent record that once was theirs. Once St. Lizier was the principal city of Couserans, a region which included all that country lying between the basins of the Ariège and the Garonne. In Roman days it was an important strategic point and bore the imposing name of _Lugdunum Consoranorum_. Later it became a bishopric and preserved all its prerogatives up to the Revolution.
The cloister of the twelfth and fourteenth-century cathedral has been classed as one of those _Monuments Historiques_ over which the French Minister of Beaux Arts has a loving care. The château of other days was used also as an episcopal palace, but has undergone to-day the desecration of serving as a madhouse.
At each step, as one strolls through St. Lizier, he comes upon relics of the past, posterior even to the coming of Christianity. On the height of the hill were four pagan temples, one each to the honour of Minerva, Mars, Jupiter and Janus. Only a simple souvenir of the latter remains to complete the story of their former existence as set forth in the chronicles. There is a two-visaged "Janus-head," discovered in 1771, which is now in the old cathedral.
To the north of St. Lizier, a dozen kilometres or so, is the Château de Noailhan, dating from the fifteenth century, which is admirable from an architectural point of view.