Tarn River

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Tarn
High cliffs in the Gorges du Tarn.
Origin	Cévennes
Mouth	Garonne
Basin countries	France
Length	375 km
Source elevation	1,550 m
Avg. discharge	200 m³/s
Basin area	15,700 km²

A boatman with some tourists begins a ride through the Gorges du Tarn

The Tarn River (tarnis in Latin; hypothetical meaning: rapid or walled in) is a 375 kilometre (235 miles) long river in southern France (régions Languedoc-Roussillon and Midi-Pyrénées), right tributary of the Garonne.

The Tarn River runs in a roughly westerly direction, from its source at an altitude of 1,550 m on Mont Lozère in the Cévennes mountains (part of the Massif Central), through the deep gorges and canyons of the Gorges du Tarn (that cuts through the Causse du Larzac), to Moissac in Tarn-et-Garonne, where it joins the Garonne River 4 km (2.5 miles) downstream the center of town.

Its basin covers approximately 12,000 km², and it has a mean flow of approximately 140 m³ per second.

[edit] Main Tributaries

The tributaries of the Tarn include the Tarnon, the Dourbie, the Agout, and the Aveyron, and the Tarn separates the Narbonne and Aquitaine basins.

[edit] Departments and Cities

The Tarn passes through the following departments and towns:

The Millau Viaduct, the highest bridge in the world, carrying the A75 autoroute across the Tarn Gorge near Millau, opened in December 2004.

The Tarn River is famous for its brutal floodings, which are the most dangerous in Europe along with the Danube River. The famous flooding of March 1930 saw the Tarn rise more than 17 meters (56 ft) above its normal level in Montauban in just 24 hours, with a discharge of 7,000 m³/s (average discharge of Rhine River is 2,200 m³/s; average discharge of Nile River during the traditional annual flooding before the building of the Aswan Dam was 8,500 m³/s; average discharge of the Mississippi River is 16,200 m³/s). One third of the Tarn-et-Garonne département was flooded, about 300 people died, thousands of houses were destroyed, the low districts of Montauban were destroyed, the town of Moissac was almost entirely destroyed.