Situated at the foot of a 1000m+ mountain range, Laroque has been using water power for centuries. In the 12thC a canal was built from the river to power five watermills in the village. Eight hundred years later, just before WW1, this pond was built to collect water from the same canal to supply an electical generator. Laroque became one of the first French villages to have electric street lighting. It is said that on the day the generator was fired up for the first time, some inhabitants of the neighboring village of Sorède arrived with buckets, hoping to take some of this new-fangled electricity home with them.
