Cities of Spain by David Gilmour

Author:David Gilmour [David Gilmour]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780712660785
Google: YuluAAAACAAJ
Publisher: Pimlico
Published: 1994-11-15T00:16:40.102523+00:00

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1 This is the house he moved to in 1914. The Unamuno museum beside the university is in the house where he lived when he was rector between 1900 and 1914.

CHAPTER SIX

Cádiz

NOT MANY PEOPLE visit Cádiz nowadays. The ancient port attracts few Spaniards and fewer foreigners, who when they do go are disappointed to discover it is not ‘typically Andalusian’. They do not find a town of low white houses, nor a Holy Week of delirious display, nor even a strong bullfighting tradition. Unlike Seville, it has not been the home of high grandee families nor the goal of pícaros and beggars. But neither has it bred great painters or writers of its own, although Murillo worked there at the end of his life and died shortly after falling off some scaffolding in the Capuchin church.

If Seville is like a concave mirror, enlarging Spanish virtues as well as Spanish defects, Cádiz is the opposite. It diminishes or even conceals its qualities. Although there is much beauty in its streets, Cádiz is a shabby and decayed place today, a provincial town no longer among the top twenty cities of the country; even in its own province it has been overtaken in size by Jerez. Spaniards recognize its past importance, but the place has never imprinted itself on the Spanish psyche. There is no whiff of the conquistadors in Cádiz (although Columbus embarked on his second transatlantic voyage from there), no Quixotic nostalgia, no musty aroma of St Teresa or the Inquisition. It is one of the most influential cities in Spanish history yet ill-known and unhailed because it is regarded, above all by Spanish conservatives, as the promoter of unSpanish values. When General Franco proclaimed that he had ‘liquidated the nineteenth century which should never have existed’ because it was ‘the negation of the Spanish spirit’, he was condemning ideas and movements which had originated in Cádiz, ideas which in his eccentric reading of Spanish history had turned the country into the ‘bastardized, Frenchified and Europeanized Spain of the “liberals”’.

Cádiz’s earlier historic role is of course well known. Its position, its harbour and the trade winds made it a natural port for its rulers as well as a natural target for their enemies. Founded by Phoenicians just after the Trojan War, Cádiz is probably the oldest city in Europe, but there is a theory which would make it older still: according to Edwin Björkman, it may even be the site of Atlantis. An important port under the Carthaginians and Romans, it declined under the Visigoths and Moors before resuming its role after the Reconquest. For a long time it was almost certain to be attacked in any war fought by the Spaniards. Drake’s ‘singeing of the king of Spain’s beard’ in 1587 and the sack of the town by Lord Essex in 1596 are familiar episodes: Cervantes wrote a sonnet about the second raid, mocking the cowardice of the Spanish commander, the Duke of Medina Sidonia, who arrived triumphantly

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