Cadiz

Earlier, the ship tracker said we're right off of Cadiz harbor; like Tangier, we may have gotten here earlier and are waiting for our assigned docking time. Now we seem to be moving and adjusting, getting ready to enter the harbor. There are faint lights ahead, far away, and and a bright light that pulses at intervals – like a lighthouse – but... wait... it looks like the intervals are not regular. Interesting.

Later – pulling in to the spacious Cadiz harbor, slowly turning to ease up to the pier. It's raining on and off, still dark. We're snugged right up to the old town, as promised – our walking tour will start right off the ship. The lighthouse thing seems actually to be a lighthouse – you can see the beam in the mist, rotating around. But it's two lights in quick succession, then nothing as they rotate around, then two lights, etc. Like a lighthouse with ADHD.

Orange trees everywhere

Off we go. This morning, we're in for a three-hour walking tour of the older part of Cadiz, including the cathedral. It's raining. We are walking in a group of about 20 umbrellas. Luckily, the rain tapers off after a while, and never really picks up seriously until about the last half hour.

Cadiz was, according to our Tour Director during yesterday's Port Talk, founded in 1104 BC by the Phoenicians, and is the oldest continually settled city in Spain – in western Europe, according to our guide today. The Phoneticians apparently, on a dare, sailed through the Gates of Hercules, flipped a coin (or whatever passed for coinage in those days), and sailed north; almost right away, they found a pretty good harbor at the mouth of a couple of big rivers, and settled down. They were looking for metals, and they found enough to stay.

We walk out of the ship, through the small terminal, across a busy boulevard and we're into the part of the city built in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Before long we come to the Plaza de Espana (“This is Spain! Every city has a Plaza de Espana!”). This one is pretty significant, however. A large part of the Plaza is taken up with a monument to the creation of Spain's first Constitution, written in 1812, when Cadiz was the center of anti-Napoleonic Spanish forces. According to our guide (and articulated here for me by Google), the Constitution "established national sovereignty, a constitutional monarchy, separation of powers, freedom of the press, and universal male suffrage (indirectly), abolishing feudalism and the Inquisition."

The Constitution actually came and went during the rest of the 19th century, depending on how absolutist the monarch was, and Spain actually endured the Fascist state of Francisco Franco for 36 years in the 20th century. But throughout all that time, up to the present, this document – one of the first of its type in history – defined Spanish democratic thinking.

The monument is, IMHO, pretty ugly, but it's not my monument, so I don't get a vote. On the

Hercules

back of it, representing, I suppose, the earliest Spanish history, is Hercules, who, according to Greek mythology, was sent here to Cadiz to perform his tenth of twelve Labors, which was killing a giant of some sort. We saw Hercules all over town.

All the streets we walked on this morning were paved with stone, very often supplemented with tile at the sides (which was slippery in the rain).

We walked, then, through an old city which had prospered from maritime trade. Many fine buildings, which were owned by merchants, had large towers on their tops, which were used to watch for ships returning from the Atlantic. Our guide says there were thirty three of these in Cadiz; at lunch we overheard someone saying that according to their guide, there were 110. Regardless, they are very distinctive additions to a building's architecture, and historic artifacts, like widow's walks.

The older part of Cadiz we walked through is pretty extensive (we walked a long way). It's the northernmost section of the island/peninsula that Cadiz is on, and is labeled “Mentidero” on Google Maps. Streets are narrow, and lined with the typical old-world urban buildings: shops on the first floor, apartments above. Buildings are generally three to five stories high. Streets are usually straight, and although you can't say they're in a strict grid pattern, they're pretty regular, not like the streets and alleys of Tangier, Tunis and European medieval cities. Buildings often have courtyards inside. Streets often feed into squares or plazas, some of which are paved over (stone, of course), some of which are heavily wooded, and each of which has its own story.

The architecture is very pretty and pretty regular throughout this part of town. The pictures (coming in the online version) really tell it all – three or four stories; half-balconies (I think they're called French balconies) with French doors (some are converted into floor-to-ceiling windows); pleasant muted colors, each one different. Also – cannon barrel corner protectors, which we've never seen or heard of before (see bottom of page).

Overall, the stone and tiled streets, the elegant balconies and the pretty colors made walking through old Cadiz very pleasant, regardless of anything else. Walking through beautiful architecture has a strong emotional effect on me – I'm in an environment where I only need to enjoy the beauty, the sense of history, the solidity of the stone, the pleasing colors and shapes. I felt that way in Tangier, and Valletta, and in the Gothic and Born sections of Barcelona. In each case, I'd love to live there, and have all that around me all the time, at least for a while.

We took a break to look around the central market of Cadiz - the largest indoor market in Spain - on our own, but spent half that free time waiting on line for the restrooms – one toilet for each gender, but the women used the handicapped stall too, so Abbey was done before I was. Anyway – the central market is probably a little larger than an American football field – one-storied and covered by a flat roof. Inside, it's light and airy, and passages in a grid design contain dozens and dozens of stalls – fish, meat, fruits, fish, vegetables, shellfish, fish – really, mostly fish. Enormous amounts of everything, fresh and gleaming; there was a faint smell of fresh fish in the air, a pleasant, cool atmosphere. Much like the souks, there were lots of everything – butchers, fishmongers, purveyors of fruits, vegetables and shellfish. Meat was cut to order; oysters were being shucked.

I love these markets, ones I've seen in person, heard about or seen pictures of. This is the food we should all be eating – chosen daily, cooked when we get home, eaten together. A cloth bag; walk to the market, choose what looks good today (it all looks good), think of a recipe, or make up a new one, buy just enough for tonight, sit with friends and talk, walk home to your kitchen with the spices and vinegars and oils, and start cooking. Fresh, simple, unprocessed, healthy. Oh, to live in a stone city with balconies and plastered walls, and eat real food from the market in the next street.

We stopped at the seaside and looked at the fort and the fortifications, old now, of historic interest only. We gazed out across the bay to Naval Station Rota, a combined Spanish-US naval station which also houses elements of the US Marines, Army and Air Force.

Cadiz has a pretty extensive maritime history. Columbus sailed from Cadiz on his second and fourth voyages to the New World. Cadiz was well situated to be the place where you took off for the spice-laden east, south past Africa and around the Cape of Good Hope. It was the “monopoly port” for Spanish trade with the Americas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. And it was from Cadiz that the combined Spanish-French fleet sailed to ignominious defeat, at the hands of Admiral Horatio Nelson and the British Navy, at the Battle of Trafalgar in1805.

Cadiz was well-defended; for centuries, there was a lot of wealth here to defend. As the stream of gold diminished after the heady sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (and was diverted to the other European lands of well-connected Kings and Holy Roman Emperors (looking at you, Charles V)), at the same time that Napoleon became interested in Spain, there was a general economic decline. So that's when the residents of Cadiz decided to build a new cathedral.

The Cathedral of Cadiz is a little different from any cathedral we've been in. Two domed towers flank it's main entrance (which is only opened on Easter and one or two other special days), and between them is an unusual neoclassical... something. During the Port Talk the previous evening, the Tour Director described the Cathedral as Baroque, but... I don't know. It's a little late for Baroque (built 1722-1838). Six different architects worked on it, and it shows, most clearly in the stone: halfway through, one of the architects decided to change the kind of stone used; the new stone was an entirely different color. A glance at the main facade of the cathedral will tell that story. The new stone – limestone, used for the upper part – is susceptible to deterioration – and so there is mesh strung high above your head, throughout the Cathedral, so that pieces that fall off shouldn't hit you in the head. There are actually pieces of stone, that have fallen off from somewhere, up in the mesh.

This is a cathedral that was built after frescoes were popular, so although the interior design is very pleasing – soaring, complex, with lots of light due to the many windows – it somehow feels like it's missing something. And it dwarfs the paintings and statues that occupy the chapels all around the nave. The crypt is large, open, well-lit, and also strangely empty – is anyone buried here?

It does have a big, elaborate memorial made all out of sliver, that glitters and shines in an otherworldly way - The Processional Monstrance* of Corpus Christi, twelve feet tall, which is wheeled out, with a driver and pushers inside it, for the Feast of Corpus Christi, held forty days after Easter.** It is quite a sight; reflections of the bright lighting sparkle, and it has that sense of being there and being not there at the same time.

There was a small Christmas Market outside the Cathedral (right outside the Cathedral) but it either wasn't open yet, or not set up yet. It started to rain a little more heavily when we left the Cathedral, and we were through with the tour anyway, so we made our way quickly to the ship, hung up our wet coats, put our feet up, and eventually went to lunch.

Another leisurely lunch, inside this time, but we went out afterward to look around. We're tied up next to a Costa ship – that's the line whose ship Concordia hit a reef in 2012 and tipped over. I'm surprised the brand survived – no one had heard of them until the disaster. There's a large warehouse right by the water that is decorated by a brightly-colored mural on all sides. It's cool, not cold and, for the moment, not raining.

Abbey took a nap for a while, but otherwise we were reading two plays under consideration by our theater company. Then we went down to Chef's Table for our last specialty dinner – and discovered we had the wrong night: it's tomorrow night. And I put on my good pants and combed my hair!

So we ate at the buffet, went back to the room, and watched “Casablanca” while sipping our complementary champagne. The movie, as usual, did not disappoint, and it was even better this time, knowing the background of the actors and the history going on around it.

Here's looking at you, kid!

* - Google says a monstrance is “an ornate, often large vessel used in Catholic and some other Christian traditions to display the consecrated Eucharist (the Host) for adoration and during solemn public processions, like the Feast of Corpus Christi.”

** - Wasn't that the feast day being celebrated so noisily in Cologne when we were there last spring?

Catedral de Santa Cruz de Cádiz: