Cádiz (Part 2)

Cádiz is a lovely place. Large plazas, tiny cobbled roads (and lots of very scraped and bent cars!) and tall elegant buildings with balconies, many of them glazed in the Galician style. There are lots of green parks areas as well as the plazas and in both there are exotic trees and other flora planted with the first seeds brought back from the Americas by the early trading ships.

A huge yellow fin tuna

The covered market, the oldest in Europe, is a delight to visit. A real hubbub of people; some just watching the world go by with a glass of wine or sherry surrounded by their shopping bags and others in the thick of haggling for a good deal. The choice of what is available is amazing and, on the day we visited, the fish hall had the largest tunas we have ever seen being cut up into thick steaks.

We spent a few hours at the Museum of Cádiz which has halls dedicated to fine art and puppetry and, more interestingly, rooms with artifacts from pre-historic, Phoenician, Roman and mediaeval times. The majority of the display texts are in Spanish but there are enough in English for non-Spanish speakers like us to follow the sense of the displays and, anyway, some of the artifacts have no need of explanation, like the 2 huge Phoenician sarcophagi and the beautiful gold rings from Roman burial sites. It’s impossible to be in Cádiz and not be impressed with just how long it has been inhabited as a city.

Castillo de San Sebastián

City gate, Cathedral and merchant’s watch tower

We also enjoyed walking out on the causeway to visit the Castillo de San Sebastián which guards the western approaches to Cádiz and which all our books say is not open to the public. We didn’t get arrested so I guess the guidebooks are out of date! It’s easy to see how it has been expanded over the years with gradually more modern defences.

The city itself sits on the end of a narrow peninsula and is surrounded by a thick protective wall with battlements and cannon emplacements. There are even the remnants of a Roman amphitheatre. We were certainly kept busy exploring everything.

In the afternoons, whilst we were being tourists, the locals crowded the beaches and the city was quiet but by night the streets really came alive.  Having moved from Galicia to Andulacía, we decided that we needed to sample the new-to-us local culture both in terms of wine (we are now trialing very dry sherry as an aperitif) and in terms of entertainment. We thought we should see some flamenco, proper flamenco for the Spanish rather than glitzy flamenco for the tourists. The local tourist information office recommended a peña (flamenco bar) which, on the Saturday night, put on was a type of 'end of season concert’ in the school playground next door. We stayed for about 2 hours and saw just a couple of acts, each performing a few pieces.

It was certainly unlike any of our preconceived ideas of flamenco. There was more singing and less dancing than we had expected and there were certainly no castanets but there was plenty of guitar music, percussion provided by backing hand-clappers and some very stylized dancing. It wasn’t really to our taste but the primarily Spanish audience definitely enjoyed the evening and many were singing along or ‘Ole-ing’ at opportune moments.

And, of course, we enjoyed visiting the Tapas Bars.

We had a great time in Cádiz. There’s so much to see and we would very much recommend it as a stopping point. The Levanter blowing so strongly had certainly done us a favour in making us stay longer in Cádiz than we planned, however, getting into the Mediterranean is now our priority.