Confolens was built around a fortress first mentioned in the eleventh century. It still has picturesque remnants of its medieval past, including city walls and several houses dating from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries. It also features a bridge first mentioned in the fourteenth century, and two churches from the 11th and 14th centuries respectively. In the nineteenth century, Confolens developed itself as the administrative center for a considerable agriculture area, due to its role as
sous-prefecture and the distance of all other major towns
Angoulême (to the south-west),
Limoges and
Poitiers are all about 70 kilometres away. It has several handsome nineteenth century administrative buildings, some of which were built by
Paul Abadie, who was very active in the region. There has been limited further urbanization in the twentieth century. The population of the town has aged, and the number of agriculture and industrial jobs have declined. British and Dutch have been acquiring property in and around the town, and now form a significant presence. One of the most prominent people to have hailed from Confolens is
Émile Roux, a physician and immunologist who was a close collaborator of
Louis Pasteur. The former Confolens high school was named for Roux. ==Population==