Cádiz

This morning, after yet another time change, we sailed in Cádiz harbor, the very same harbor from which Columbus sailed.  I was feeling rather excited to really see Cádiz. I had seen this city briefly once before. In the summer of 1989, John and I studied Spanish for three weeks in Seville. All teachers in LA were supposed to become bilingual, and studying Spanish in Spain seemed a lot more interesting than doing it at Long Beach State. Our homestay situation was just miserable, so we tried to escape Seville on the weekends. On one of those escapes were went to the Algarve in Portugal, and we drove through Cádiz on the way. I remembered a bridge and a tower.

As we sailed in, I could see the remnants of the ancient city walls.

I could also see the Andalusian roofs and spires that had made Byron fall in love with this city 200 years ago.

I also saw some less lovely modern architecture. This telecommunications tower is not quite as bad as the Postal Tower in London, but it’s close.

The glorious eighteenth century Catedral Nueva floats over the old city.

As we pulled close to the dock so did a fire boat. I didn’t know if it was a salute or whether I should be a little nervous.

John and I had bought tickets in advance for the hop-on, hop-off bus. But so had a lot of other people, and the line to get on the first one that pulled up was over a block long. So I pushed John to the Plaza San Juan de Dios, which was the starting point for a walking tour in one of my guidebooks.

The plaza was a pleasant open area. There were a number of stalls selling local handicrafts.

We bought a couple things for the grandnephew’s birthday next month. We continued on to the cathedral, but the lines to get in were pretty long and it did not look accessible for a wheelchair. So John just said, “Maybe we can do it later.” I was a little disappointed, but I understood.

The Jesuit church of Saint James the Apostle was just across the plaza, so we went in there instead. There was the usual two-story baroque reredos behind the high altar.

In one of the side aisles, there was a particularly gruesome depiction of the Virgin of Sorrows.

Most intriguing were the grilled galleries. These were built to allow some people to attend Mass without being seen by the people below.

Is that a carved crown? Was this for visiting members of the Royal family? Was this some kind of chapel royal after the suppression of the Jesuit order? I had lots of questions, but there was nobody there to answer them.

Continuing on we saw a site which appeared to be an archeological dig. There were what I recognized as Phoenician letters displayed. Cádiz is the oldest settlement in Western Europe. The Phoenicians settled it around 1100 BCE. The Romans later conquered it and made it one of their most important settlement in the Iberian peninsula. The remains of a Roman theater have also be excavated.

There was a really excellent museum attached to these ruins, and I learned a surprising number of new things about Roman theater.

From there, we walked down lovely little narrow streets. There were shops and cafes on the ground floor, and apartments above.

I see why so many urban planners in America want to reproduce this pattern, but it seldom works. What is romantic in Cádiz is sterile in Redding.

We pushed on to the Hospital for Women. This looked so unappealing on the exterior that we almost skipped it. Fortunately, we did not. It is a lovely piece of eighteenth century architecture with a beautiful open courtyard.

All the hospital rooms opened up on this courtyard, and there was probably a cistern and a garden where the tiled floor is now.

An elegant staircase leads to the upper floors.

The chapel was exquisite. There is a beautifully restored image of the Virgin of Carmel.

But the real treasure is El Greco’s Eustasy of Saint Francis above one of the side altars in the rear of the chapel.

By this time John was getting pretty tired and he wanted to go back to the ship. We were not far from the Escape, so that was pretty easy to do. We thought we might rest a little bit and then go out again. But he was so tired that he napped for close to two hours. We never did use those bus tickets.

Tomorrow, off to Grenada.