Cadiz

Cádiz is a small historic sea town on a small island in the Atlantic ocean.

It is famous for being an important port of Spain, where many famous explorers would depart from.

The region is also unique for harvesting sea salt in farms from it’s tidal ecosystem.

As usual, the first day is spent wandering around.
Luckily Cadiz is not very big, as it’s constrained by the island it is on.

From the train station, the first sight is the main cathedral.

Journal Entry

Cadiz is a city on a small island, so it isn’t too hard to not get lost.

First I found a seafood market, and tried a couple things. I got bread topped with what I thought was falafel, but was full of a jet black paste.

Keep walking until I found the beach, and saw a massive lighthouse castle thing with a long bridge leading to it, so obviously needed to go out there. It was an old castle built on an island.

After getting back, I decided to just walk around the island. There was another fort, where apparently after ww2 a bunch of sea mines exploded and destroyed half the town.

Kept going and found an old growth tree that was massive.

The best part about Cadiz is, of course, the sea.

I vaguely knew that the beach was on the north part of the island, so heading in that direction I saw a sign for a “mercado”. I was pretty hungry at this point and made a quick detour.

This was the central market of Cadiz, with tons of fish, paella and other delicious looking things.

I got something that I thought was falafel, except it was the strangest black gooey paste on the inside. I thought it was mushroom. Obviously I should have known better, being on an island in the ocean, that this was actually a squid ink ball, called “Croquetas de calamares”

On the north end of the island, there is a fort (Castillo de San Sebastian) way out in the sea connected by a skinny stone bridge.

Walking out to the end gave some great views of Cadiz and the bay.

I then just decided to walk around the perimeter of the rest of the island, to see what I may find.

There was a classic fisherman scene of boats anchored in low tide.

There was also a fort (Castillo de Santa Catalina) with some dark history. After WW2, there was a huge amount of sea mines stored here.. Thousands of them exploded in 1947, in one of the largest non-nuclear explosions ever, destroying much of the town.