The best running trails around Moëze

fortified village, former port of departure for the Americas, today it is located approximately 1.5km from the shore...

Right in the middle of the Poitou-Charente marshes, the pretty village of Brouage enhances the landscape with its 16th century fortifications.

More information can be found here: https://meinfrance.com/brouage-schoenste-doerfer-zitadelle/

The stronghold of Brouage is a former salt trading port named Jacopolis-sur-Brouage, which became a Catholic war port wanted by Cardinal Richelieu who named it Brouage in 1627 to compete with the Huguenot stronghold of La Rochelle. Brouage is also considered to be perhaps the birthplace of the geographer Samuel de Champlain who participated in the founding and colonization of New France, and who is the founder of the city of Quebec in Canada. A military port on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean until the beginning of the 18th century, the town is today inland and surrounded by marshes. Attention: inside the citadel the streets are almost exclusively paved.

Small town best known among cyclists for its river shuttle to Rochefort. The town remained for a long time an important crossing point for crossing the Charente between and the ocean, one of the only crossing points of the Charente with the Saint-Savinien ferry between Taillebourg and the ocean, until construction in 1842 of the Tonnay-Charente Suspension Bridge. The ferry was located at the current marina. The first mention of this ferry in the archives dates from 1477 but it existed well before. While the Rochefort lifting span bridge was put into service, the crossing of the Charente on the ferry stopped on February 5, 1967. The two stone slipways on either side of the river, where a road from Rochefort ended on the right bank, are still visible today at the village level and are used for launching boats. A ferry or ferry boat, the Rohan, has been back in service since June 2013 for the summer period. It has a transport capacity of 12 people including the pilot and 11 passengers on foot or by bike (2-3 Euro). At an altitude of 13 meters, on a spur overlooking the Charente which naturally lends itself to defense, there was a castle with a village enclosed by a surrounding wall like on the other bank at Rochefort. The castle is attested from 1092 with a first siege, and its destruction by a first fire. It is one of the first rocky banks encountered coming from the sea, on the left (south) bank of the Charente. On a seal dated 1383 there is this inscription in Latin: “subissia prima urbs insularum est sub borea” which can be translated as: “Soubise is the first town in the lee of the islands”. This is why in 1665, Jean-Baptiste Colbert proposed to the Duke of Rohan to sell his lordship or exchange it with the king to build a war port to arm and repair ships to protect them from attacks. English, but he refused and the project was finally carried out in Rochefort which is further from the estuary with a smaller draft. https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soubise_(Charente-Maritime)

One could also leave the city by other passages: two posterns, the curtain of the sea, two underground ports in the sides of the bastions of La Brèche and Hiers for navigation by boat in the ditches. There are two powder magazines, that of François d'Espinay de Saint-Luc with four flying buttresses contained 30 tons of powder, that of La Brèche, built by Vauban in 1692, contained 20 tons.

The walled city's busiest gate connects to the civilian city through which it was originally founded. The Hiers gate was almost completely demolished and was protected by advanced works.

The village of Hiers built on an old island in the Santon archipelago. At that time, the village was an island in the middle of the Gulf of Saintonge, a gulf which will then fill in over the centuries to become nothing more than a marsh today. The island is part of an archipelago with other islets such as those of Guilletterie, Montboileau, Fremailloux and Érablais. Due to its relatively high altitude allowing to control navigation between the mainland and the island of Oléron, a castle and a priory were built from the eleventh century which depended on the seigneury of Broue. The monks of the Saint-Hilaire church were already exploiting the salt. Jacopolis (Brouage) was founded in 1555 on an old deposit of ballast forming bulges of pebbles and mud. Brouage was the outer port of the village of Hiers, it was first designed without military intentions but to be a trading center. Ten years after its foundation, the city receives a visit from Charles IX. https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiers-Brouage#Les_origines