Cadíz, Spain

The island at the end of the world

Cadíz's old city is technically an island but it's connected to the Iberian Peninsula by a long causeway built on a sandbar. This sandspit creates a harbor so good that the founding Phoenicians used their word for enclosure to name the town Gadir and after centuries of sanding by Romans and Arab tongues we get today’s name: Cadíz. Many unenlightened Europeans thought this to be the end of the world until Columbus proved them wrong. His second expedition left Cadíz in 1493. Contrary to popular myth today, educated Europeans at that time thought the world was round -- but small. So small that China and Japan were only a few weeks sail away if only one knew the right direction.

Founded by Phoenicians around 1100 BC, Cadíz may be the oldest continuously inhabited Western city. The Carthaginians took over about 500 BC, followed by the Romans who made this their 2nd busiest port (after Ostia which served the city of Rome itself).

If you had a fleet, you’d base it in Cadíz as did the Romans and the Spanish Bourbons. Because its wealth-laden ships were attacked by pirates, (aren’t we glad those days are over), Spain ran two protected convoys a year in a combination of merchant and warships called the Treasure Fleet or West Indies Fleet – which they headquartered here.

Long before that the natural harbor attracted commerce and military interest; today over 2500 ships rest pickled in the anaerobic mud that makes the sea around this town one of the most archeologically rich spots in the world. 
 

The trade center of the world

Unfortunately, Cadíz’s sea exposure on 3 sides makes it inviting to whatever other navy happens to be in the area. With Spain's wealth and power, many enemies attacked including Barbary Pirates from the south and the English from the north who all but leveled the place in 1596. Because of Cadíz’s naval exposure and its distance from the rest of Iberia, the larger city of Seville became the focal point for Spain’s trade with its huge New World colonies.  Inland Seville was more protected and its long Guadalquivir River and fertile valley gave it great position for importing gold and exporting Andalusian products.

But then the Guadalquivir silted up. So in 1717 the monopoly in the institution of the La Casa de Contratación (The House of Trade) moved to Cadíz – and with it the huge wealth that made merchants rich. In those days, any Spanish colony could trade with only one European city. Spain was by far the largest empire and Cadíz was the place for merchants to become rich.

Despite 3 millennia of Cadíz history, much of the old town appears to be the work of one very prosperous century: the 18th, when the Casa de Contratación monopoly funded the rebuilding of a town that the Brits had leveled a century earlier. By 1790, the Casa was disbanded. Cadíz never recovered – its loss but our gain, as monies were not available in future generations to tear down the beautiful Baroque and neo-classical structures and replace them with Wal-marts.  The old town Cadíz we see is pretty much what we’d see in 1850.

Forts and walls

Beach Goddesses

Today the fortifications are attacked only by tourists and beach structures such as this modernist building on sticks at Playa de La Caleta were built for the natives. Does every building in this neo-classical town get a dome, even the changing rooms on the beach?

Unfortunately, this building fell on hard times before being restored in the 1990s. Today it serves as the headquarters for underwater archeologists -- a busy group as over 2500 ships have sunk into (and are well preserved by) the anaerobic mud in Cadíz harbor and bay.

Although the smallest beach on the island, Caleta is the most popular and witnessed knife-bearing and bikini-clad Halle Maria Berry emerging ala Ursala Andress in a 2002 James Bond film where Cadíz impersonated Havana. (If you’d rather your mythology came from the Greeks instead of Bond movies, you may argue that Halle rises ala Aphrodite who wore even less than Ursula did in the 1962 “Dr. No.” Cadíz, founded within a century of Troy’s destruction, needs no modern heroes, especially from the Brits.)



At right is a bit of tile by Justo Ruiz de Luna honoring our Lady of Palma who greets bathers at La Caleta's beachhouse. This 1920s reinforced concrete structure replaced two previous wood buildings, one the Royal Spa (hence the REAL) and the Palma Spas. Nice of Mary to stop by for naming rights. She was not the first as the Phoenicians who came around 1100 BC had a temple here to their virgin and mother goddess Astarte (whom the Greeks renamed Aphrodite.) Halle, Mary, Astarte, Aphrodite -- this is a beach for goddesses!

Party on