Cádiz | Andokides' Porch

Overnight on the boat, and the next morning, we were in Cádiz, pronounced KAH diz as we were told by a native Spaniard who was tired of hearing ka DEEZ. “Look at the accent mark!” he said, irritably.

Cádiz was the most compact and manageable of our port stops and the only one in which Pete and I took the time to just sit awhile at a sidewalk café and enjoy some sangria. Our lunch in Cádiz, tapas at another little sidewalk café, was some of the best food of the trip. Cádiz was the most consistently picturesque of the places we visited, almost too much so. It risked becoming a Disney-fied version of a charming Spanish town.

In Cádiz, we toured a Cathedral (one of two in Cádiz, I believe), de rigueur for Spanish cities; as Gottfried, an Austrian whom I met on the boat and an experienced cruiser, put it: “I like my days at sea; I don’t have to climb any mountains or see any churches.” There was also an archeological site, the Yacimiento Archaeological site, from the 8th century BCE. This is the remains of what once served as a bishop’s palace, and is now built over and protected. Tourists can walk through the palace on glass bridges.

After lunch, we passed through the Sunday markets in search of Torre Tavira. Torre Tavira is one of 126 18th-century watchtowers still standing in Cádiz. Today, Torre Tavira houses one of a handful of large-scale cameras obscura in the world. It’s basically a pin-hole camera writ large. This one has a pin-hole, a mirror to direct the light down into the darkened room in the top of the tower, and a magnifying lens. Real-time images are projected onto a white bowl in the dark room, the bowl maybe five or six feet across. Now, we live in an age of stupefying technologies--jet aircraft, the Internet, amazing computers, MRIs, microwave ovens, 3D motion pictures, digital photography--but I have never been so awed as I was as our docent panned around the city of Cádiz with this mirror, allowing us to see people walking on the street, people hanging out laundry, dogs on rooftop terraces, cars passing down boulevards. As we watched, I was convinced that our docent was a powerful sorceress, indeed; I understood how primitive peoples would have come to regard their European colonizers as gods.

For more photos of Cádiz, click here. Photos are best viewed by double clicking on the first one, then using the navigation arrows at the top of the screen to scroll through the album.