Cádiz (Part 1)

It’s now 7 July, our fourth day moored in Puerto América marina in Cádiz. Like the other visiting French, Swedish, Dutch and German yachts, we are waiting for the Levanter wind to stop blowing so strongly from the east so that we can sail through the Straits of Gibraltar and into the Mediterranean. It’s quite a mini international community and we’ve found it great fun to chat to everyone else and compare notes on where we have all been.

For us it has been a busy 4 days spent very much in ‘tourist mode’. We can now safely say that we have ‘done’ Cádiz. The marina is as close to the city as you can get a mooring but it is still about 1 km to get to the old city wall. After spending a couple of hours walking around in the evening on Thursday 4 July and around 6 hours exploring on Friday our sore feet told us it was time to get out the folding bikes. Once again they have proved to be a very wise buy and we are now zipping backwards and forwards painlessly.

Cádiz is regarded as the oldest continuously inhabited settlement and the oldest city in Europe. Founded by the Phoenician traders around 800 BC there is also significant evidence of, and influence from, the periods when it was inhabited by the Romans and the Moors; there is certainly no shortage of heritage to discover in Cádiz. In the 18^th century Cádiz grew to be incredibly wealthy on the back of trade with the American colonies. Apparently in this era 75% of Spanish trade with the colonies came through Cádiz, which explains the grandeur of the merchant houses and other buildings here.

To keep track of the arrival of trade ships the merchants built watchtowers. There were about 160 of them in the city (about 129 remain) and we were able to visit the tallest of them, the Torre Tavira. It has a Camera Obscura fitted so we started with a ‘guided tour’ of the city looking at the projected live view of the city. Our guide panned the camera across the roof tops picking out the key sites; a whole guided tour of the city on just 20 minutes!

The rest of our time in the tower was spent at the top looking at the fantastic panorama of the city. To give you an idea of the view I’ve stitched a few of my photographs together. They are a little disjointed in places but are not a bad start point to show you a little of what we have seen in Cádiz.