The Forteresse de Salses sits just off the main road north of Perpignan, and from a distance it barely reads as a fortress at all. That is the point. Built by the Spanish around 1500, it was one of the first forts designed for the age of gunpowder: low, thick, hunkered into the ground so cannonballs would skim over rather than punch through.
Up close the scale lands. The walls are metres deep, faced in the local pink brick over a stone base, the whole thing wrapped in a dry moat with sentry turrets on the corners. Everything about it is engineered to absorb a hit and keep working.
Grey light suited it. A fort built for siege does not want a pretty sky.