Melissa and I laugh about the fact that we spent three months zigzagging around southern Spain in 2008 and 2017 and never once got to the seaside—the thing that draws so many visitors to the region. We tried to go to the beach once during our 2008 trip, but that attempt ended with our host’s car stuck in the mud.
On this visit, we finally made it to the sea! You can’t miss it in Cadiz, a city on Spain’s southern coast that is almost entirely surrounded by water. Cadiz is an old place, founded by the Phoenicians as a trading port sometime before 600 B.C. It’s located on the Strait of Gibraltar, where the Atlantic Ocean meets the Mediterranean Sea. The marshlands around Cadiz’s large bays have been used since antiquity to produce salt (by evaporating seawater). The Romans also used the area to produce high-quality garum, a fermented fish sauce that was their prized condiment.
Cadiz still has a maritime feel. There are working ports in the harbor and lots of sandy beaches nearby, including one next to the historic centro area (Cadiz’s old town) that is a favorite hangout spot for residents. Restaurants and open-air markets are full of local seafood, including red tuna, squid, langoustines, and shrimp of every size. Some of the city’s most iconic tapas bars began as ultramarinos, shops that sold provisions for overseas trading voyages. Today, ultramarinos are still lined with shelves of tinned seafood from all over Spain and cases full of dried sausages and cheese. They still sell goods to take away, or you can snack on their products at the bar over a drink, as many Cadiz residents flock to do before dinner.
Ah, choices! Over your drink, do you nibble on fine mussels in olive oil, courtesy of a tin from northern Spain, or small fried shrimp from local waters served in a paper cone? We did both.
In between meals, Cadiz is a pleasant place to explore. Its compact old town has lots of narrow streets that stay shaded from the strong sun. Like many Spanish downtowns, it’s made for walking. The city also has a pretty 18th- and 19th-century cathedral and an interesting museum with artifacts from Phoenicians, Romans, and other peoples who settled here. On the edges of the old town, seaside esplanades make great places for strolling. They’re dotted with parks that are mini gardens full of exotic plants brought here from around the world (including several huge tropical strangler fig trees that are visible from the water).
The sea played a role in Cadiz’s urban architecture. Many homes in the old town had watchtowers on their roofs, where residents could monitor the arrival of ships. Today, more than 100 watchtowers remain. You can visit the highest one, Torre Tavira, and see the city through a camera obscura—an old technology that essentially created live video images in a time before photography. The camera obscura atop Torre Tavira resembles a big square periscope with lenses that project what they view onto a large horizontal screen below.
As you stand in a pitch-black room near the top of the tower, the operator removes the cover of the rooftop camera obscura. Suddenly, a bright image of whitewashed buildings, blue sky, and dark water appears on the screen in front of you. At first it looks like a photograph, until you notice movement: drying laundry fluttering on terraces, people walking in plazas, a ship motoring past. As the operator turns a crank to slowly rotate the camera, you get a 360-degree view of Cadiz and its landmarks. Some of the locations visible on the screen were places Melissa and I had walked the previous day. It’s funny to think that we might have been little figures in a demonstration for a different group of tourists spying on daily life in the city.
After Cadiz, we continued our southward journey by bus to the very bottom tip of the Iberian (Spanish/Portuguese) Peninsula. There, the little town of Tarifa serves as the main port for ferries to and from downtown Tangier, Morocco. (A second ferry route runs from the Spanish city of Algeciras to the Moroccan coast east of Tangier, but it’s more useful if you’re going by car than on foot, as we were.)
Jutting into the Strait of Gibraltar, Tarifa is frequently buffeted by strong winds from either the Mediterranean or the Atlantic. Those conditions have made the town’s beaches a famous destination for kitesurfing. The surf culture gives Tarifa a laid-back vibe different from that of other Spanish villages we’ve seen, with shops selling slip-on shoes, bikinis, and beachy souvenirs, and restaurants serving food from all over the world. (We ate at Thai and New Zealand restaurants for a change.)
Strolling down to the port on our first afternoon in Tarifa, we had a clear view of tall mountains and white buildings across the water. It took a minute to realize that what we were seeing was in Africa, just 14 kilometers (9 miles) away! It was exhilarating to think that soon, we’d cross the strait to a continent we’d never set foot on before.
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