Statue de Pierre-Paul Riquet

The bronze statue of Pierre-Paul Riquet stands on a stone pedestal in the center of the square, depicting the engineer in a long coat, hand resting on a map of his canal. Riquet spent his personal fortune and final years building the Canal du Midi, the waterway linking the Atlantic to the Mediterranean. He died in sixteen eighty, months before the project reached completion. When the canal eventually opened, the local authorities commissioned this monument to anchor the city’s major shipping intersection.