Cadiz: The Story of Europe’s Oldest City
Helen Crisp & Jules Stewart, Hurst, £25

CITIES are touted to us by the tourism industry and its media channels through excitable superlatives. Cheapest, coolest, best for walking, most Instagrammed, top this, top that; it seems to sell. Cadiz’s claim to be Europe’s oldest city is perhaps less saleable, as well as hard to prove. Plovdiv, Athens and Vinkovci — and no doubt others — are worthy rivals. What’s more interesting is Cadiz’s deep history, its multilayered past, which is a direct consequence of its location.

On a European map, Cadiz looks marginal in the extreme — on the edge of the continent, far from Spain’s capital (Tangier is much closer), and from Europe’s principal historic centres of power. Zoom in and you’ll see the city occupies a peninsula, as if it wanted to sail away. But in which direction? To Africa, the Eastern Mediterranean or the Atlantic and America? Cadiz looks, and has been pulled in, many directions.

This is the story told in Helen Crisp and Jules Stewart’s thorough, solid, well-written portrait of Cadiz. They guide us, like reliable captains, through the maritime origins and early settlements and skirmishes that led to the rise of a port city on the edge of the Iberian Peninsula. The Phoenicians called it Gadir, meaning “stronghold” or “compound”; it’s likely the earliest port was related to the colony of Tartessos — much shrouded in myths, and linked to both Atlantis and Hercules. For four centuries Cadiz was part of the Carthaginian territory of southern Spain. 

When the Romans swept through Iberia, they focused initially on the most useful, and vulnerable, coastal enclaves. Cadiz was vital for repelling pirates and as an export conduit for wool, wine, dried fish and garum, a fermented fish sauce. It was dubbed “voluptuous Gades” by Martial, in reference to its famous dancing girls.

The Visigoths destroyed the city, but it would become strategically vital again, and the “nerve centre of the Muslim fleet,” as the southern gateway to Al-Andalus. Crisp and Stewart give each phase in Cadiz’s evolution the space to breathe and while the book is far more a work of history than of topography, the narrative is punctuated with important physical sites and relevant works of art. 

For his exploratory voyage to the New World in the summer of 1492, Columbus sailed from Palos de la Frontera. Cadiz was chosen for the second voyage, the following year, which required a larger port to prepare a fleet capable of establishing a permanent settlement in the New World. This marks the beginning of its rise to prominence as a Spanish military and commercial port, though today nearby Algeciras — which deserves its own monograph — handles 20 times the throughput of cargo. 

Drake, Byron and Robert Devereux, the 2nd Earl of Essex, are, briefly, protagonists in Cadiz’s story. There is no shortage of pen-wielding visitors, from Borrow and Ford to Dumas and Disraeli. During the Peninsular wars, Cadiz was Spain’s de facto capital and it was the port of entry for Franco’s troops. Casas Viejas, a small farming village 30 miles south-east of Cadiz, was the site of a massacre on January 11-12, 1933, when Civil Guards and Assault Guards put down an anarchist uprising, killing 26 workers and bystanders. For historian Raymond Carr, it marked the beginning of the end for the Second Republic.

To assist visitors who might drop in to Cadiz during a holiday in the “Sherry Triangle” or southern Costas, the authors have appended a tourist-oriented chapter on attractions and food and drink. But this is a serious, sober book, full of facts, details and informed readings, and makes a worthy companion to Hurst’s Granada: City of Illusions (2021), also written by a gifted duo. 

Cadiz’s age — 3,200 years and counting — is impressive, but its role as trading port city, cultural melting pot, point of embarkation for conquest and adventure, and arrival stage for dreamers and despots is gripping.