September 22, 2005

Cadiz, a Spanish mini-Manhattan
Claudia Pritchard travel to Cadiz and finds that the city is disdainful of Britain's celebration of Trafalgar.

The 360-degree view of Cádiz from the cathedral’s newly opened south tower explains why visitors to the city continually find themselves lost.
When nearly every road ends at the sea, regardless of which direction it is heading in, north south east or west, it does not help simply to head for the shore. Local people compare the city to an outstretched arm, the old town represented by the hand, the new town from wrist to elbow, and water all around the clenched fist. and Europe to the north where one acquisitive civilisation after another has come from, eager to pocket this useful and decorative trophy. Peering down from the cathedral tower, today’s invader can see layers of occupation stacked up against each other beside the 18th-century cathedral, an earlier Christian church, built over a mosque, by a Roman amphitheatre, itself probably masking Phoenician foundations.

In the city’s outstanding museum, a Phoenician woman, represented on a sarcophagus, clutching a vessel in one massive, capable hand, lies alongside a Phoenician man. They make a handsome pair, but she is probably the elder by some 100 years, although he was discovered first, in 1887, and it was this staggering find from 400BC that caused the museum to be founded then. In British minds, however, 19th-century Cádiz is inextricably linked with the the Battle of Trafalgar, named after the cape a few miles to the south.

Extensive preparations in Britain to mark the 200th anniversary of this decisive defeat for the Spanish navy have been greeted with a mixture of distain and distaste by the people of Cádiz, and there have been dissenting voices raised against marking an event both bloody and ill-timed.

For in October 1805, the Spanish officers’ awareness that the weather was changing off their cruelly rocky coastline was overridden by Napolean’s ambitions. There were too few hands on deck and thousands were lost. But a new book by the influential Spanish writer, historian and war correspondent Arturo Pérez-Reverte, retelling the story of the battle from his countrymen’s point of view, has won round the Gaditanos, whose record is a creditable one.

Cádiz became famous for its charity, medical expertise and hospitality ashore to the injured of all nationalities.

Looking out to sea is a local practice enshrined in its architecture. The Tavira tower, the tallest of the 110 or so watchtowers that still stand on the little fist, which once bristled with 250 or more such lookouts.

It was from the Tavira, now open to the public, and housing a compelling and amusing camera obscura, that the battle of 1805 was watched anxiously through telescopes. In three traditional styles one chair-shaped, one like a pepper pot, and the square ‘terraza’ the domestic towers were used for observing the arrival of trading vessels that in the 17th and 18th century brought Cádiz its enormous wealth (and for advertising that the important householder had such ships).

Today they are being newly sought out by the fashion and design conscious of Seville, an hour away, who are buying up these ‘lofts’ for enormous sums. In a town where rent is incredibly cheap, there are many doubloons left to be spent on restoration.

The attraction for these savvy style gurus is the relaxed good life of this Spanish mini-Manhattan, with its tightly packed alleyways, plazas large and small, restful and noisy, public gardens planted with rare specimans shipped back from all over the world, and the birds that nest in them, including parrots.