Rennes-le-Château (French pronunciation: [ʁɛn lə ʃato] ⓘ; Occitan: Rènnas del Castèl) is a commune approximately 5 km (3 miles) south of Couiza, in the Aude department in the Occitanie region in Southern France.

This hilltop village is known internationally; it receives tens of thousands of visitors per year,[citation needed] drawn by conspiracy theories surrounding a putative buried treasure discovered by its 19th-century priest Bérenger Saunière, the precise nature of which is disputed among those[who?]

[8] By 1050 the Counts of Toulouse held control over the area, building a castle in Rennes-le-Château around 1002,[9] though nothing remains above ground of this medieval structure—the present ruin is from the 17th or 18th century.

Surviving receipts and existing account books belonging to Saunière reveal that the renovation of the church, including works on the presbytery and cemetery, cost 11,605 Francs over a ten-year period between 1887 and 1897.

[22] Surviving receipts and existing account books belonging to Saunière reveal that the construction of his estate (including the purchases of land) between 1898 and 1905 cost 26,417 Francs.

He placed in foreign newspapers, especially in the United States, an advertisement announcing that the poor priest of Rennes-le-Château lived among heretics and had only the most meagre of resources.

He moved the Christians of the whole world to such pity by announcing that the old church, an architectural gem, was heading for unavoidable ruin if urgent restoration work was not undertaken as soon as possible.

Crouquet's article faded into obscurity and it was left to Noël Corbu, a local man who had opened a restaurant in Saunière's former estate (called L'Hotel de la Tour) in the mid-1950s, to turn the village into a household name.

[32] Noël Corbu incorporated this story into his essay L'histoire de Rennes-le-Château, deposited at the Departmental Archives at Carcassonne on 14 June 1962.

[33][34] Corbu's story was published in the book by Robert Charroux Trésors du monde in 1962,[35] that caught the attention of Pierre Plantard, who, through motives which remain unclear, used and adapted Corbu's story involving the apocryphal history of the Priory of Sion, inspiring the 1967 book L'Or de Rennes by Gérard de Sède.

[36] Sède's book contained reproductions of parchments allegedly discovered by Saunière alluding to the survival of the line of Dagobert II, from which Plantard claimed descent.

While Brown's novel never specifically mentions Rennes-le-Château, he gave some its key characters related names, such as 'Saunière' and 'Leigh Teabing' (anagrammatically derived from 'Leigh' and 'Baigent').

The extraordinary popularity of The Da Vinci Code has reignited the interest of tourists, who visit Rennes-le-Château to view the sites associated with Saunière.

The first, in May 1956, was conducted by Dr André Malacan who, after excavating the subsoil of the church at a depth of approximately one metre, discovered bones that included a skull bearing an incision, but failed to unearth anything else of interest.

[44] A simultaneous request to excavate the church met with refusal from the Directions Régionales des Affaires Culturelles (or DRAC), the archaeological body of France.

Well-known French authors like Jules Verne[49] and Maurice Leblanc[50] are suspected of leaving clues in their novels about their knowledge of the mystery of Rennes-le-Château.

Christiane Amiel has commented: No new theory has ever succeeded in entirely replacing any of the previous ones and, as the researches have intensified, so the various lines of investigation have accumulated and crossed in a system of ramifications in which criticism of one line of approach simply gives rise to others[51]and Today the vogue is for analyzing and checking the most minute details, for comparing and contrasting rival theories, for reviving old and unexplored lines of enquiry in a new guise, and for an unbridled pluralism which mixes together erudition and extrapolation, and makes recourse to geology, history, prehistory, esotericism, religious history, mysticism, the paranormal, ufology and other fields.

[51]Rennes-le-Château conspiracy theories continue to be a popular ingredient in a publishing industry that is growing exponentially, and are the subject of press articles, radio and television programs, and films.

Websites[52] and blogs devoted to the acknowledged historical mysteries present at Rennes-le-Château and environs exist in many different countries; authors' interviews can be accessed on podcasts.

[citation needed] He groups the mysteries of Rennes-le-Château with those of the Bermuda Triangle, Atlantis, and ancient astronauts as being sources of "ill-informed and lunatic books".

[54] Likewise another archaeologist Bill Putnam, co-author with John Edwin Wood of The Treasure of Rennes-le-Château, A Mystery Solved (2003, 2005) dismisses all the popular hypotheses as pseudo-history.