What To Do on A Sunny Thursday in Cádiz

Visit the Museums.

Façade of the Centre wit the bay in the background. Image 

courtesy of  http://cadiztraselobjetivo.blogspot.com.es/

Today was the turn of the Centro Cultural Reina Sofía. Luckily, this centre has nothing to do with the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid and as such is free. The centre is housed in a mid-18th century buidling that was once home to military engineers and now houses a whole host of cultural organisations: the Vasallo Museum, with a permanent exhibition of the Cádiz-born sculptor's works, the Royal Hispano-American Academy, reflecting the city's close ties with the New World, The Cádiz Atheneum, the Military Library, The Féderico Joly Foundation, the Galván Press, the Municipal Culture Foundation and the permanent exhibition of the Aramburu Picardo legacy.

The stairwell - a detail.

When we entered, we were greeted by a helpful receptionist who recommended that we start on the third floor and work our way down, so ignoring the impressive staircase we took the lift to the third floor. The lift opened onto a flat roof that gave magnificent views of Cádiz and its bay, so magnificent that I risked taking a panoramic photo of the scene that presented itself before us.

A young Detectorist?

The tower on the right is part of the building and is known as a veedor - literally a seer. Most merchant and military houses in Cádiz were built with such towers so that the interested parties could see what was going on in the Bay - mostly merchants anxiously awaiting the arrival of their ships from the Americas or elsewhere, or naval types wondering when the next horde of British prototourists (i.e. the Royal Navy) would descend upon the city, drink the place dry and then set fire to it.


But I digress. The Aramburu legacy is mainly a collection of paintings collected by the Aramburu Picardo family. Originally from the Basque Country, the Aramburus were a family of bankers who eventually sold the business and donated this collection to the city. Among the paintings, two particularly caught my attention. There was this one on the left, whose subject, commented my Dark Lady, looks remarkably like Toby Jones.


And the one on the right, a charming portrait of a young boy, and his parrot. 

Apart from the subject, what really drew our attention was the frame. Made to look like bamboo, the black blotches to be seen are small works of art in themselves, depicting oriental scenes.

On the subject of BBC lookalikes, both the little boy with the parrot and this young girl, presumably both members of the Aramburu family, bear an uncanny resemblance to 1980s Dr Who actor Colin Baker. Compare and contrast.

Colin Baker, the 6th doctor. 
Image courtesy of
doctorwho.tv.co.uk

A 19th-century Aramburu, 
looking as if she's on 
the naughty step.

It was now time to waft downtairs to the Vasallo Museum. Juan Luis Vasallo was born in Cádiz in 1908 and died some 78 years later in Madrid. The museum has a permanent exhibition of numerous pieces in bronze, stone, clay, plaster etc. Below are two photos of Vasallo's marvellous clay version of Don Quixote. It is only about 3 inches tall and inexpressibly moving. Observe the hands; they are reminiscent of El Greco paintings

Among the many other pieces were a study of the hands of Cádiz-born essayist, poet, journalist and all-round writer José María Pemán. As most of the exhibits in the whole building are hands-on, more of which later, a certain bollocks-talker couldn't resist this hands-in visual joke.

The crystal chandelier lighting up
the paintings on the wall - all very
Charley Pride.

It was then time to take to the stairs again, admiring this wonderful chandelier as we did so.                                  

Back on the ground floor, it was now time to visit the Féderico Joly Hohr Foundation. The late Féderico Joly was chairman of the Cádiz-based Joly newspaper group and upon his death bequeathed his library, including his desk and papers therein, to the city of Cádiz. and here it all is. Amazingly, his desk is not behind a glass screen and you can actually pick up his notebooks and read them and, if it takes your fancy, try on his sunglasses and sit behind the desk, pretending to be a newspaper magnate while gasping out the word "Rosebud".

Joly's desk...

...and papers.

And so ended our visit to this charming building with its enchanting collections, all the more enjoyable because you can actually touch and interact with almost all of the objects. A great afternoon out and definitely worth a second visit.

From El Puerto de Santa María to Cádiz and A Bit of French for Good Measure

El Puerto de Santa María, bathed by the Guadalete, is another Sherry town, approximately 5 miles across the bay of Cádiz from the eponymous city. Today El Puerto, like Jerez and Sanlúcar de Barrameda, is full of mouldering wineries waiting for the next property boom to be turned into des. res. flats for upper-class tourists and bijou shops idem. 

It is also famous for two 20th-century poets, Rafael Alberti[1] and Jose Luis Tejada. As well as a poet, Alberti was quite a gifted painter, but unfortunately his oratory left quite a lot to be desired – let’s just say that when reading his own oeuvre he sounded like Leonard Cohen babbling through a particularly monotonous dirge - but without the ebullient Canadian’s burning passion and joie de vivre.

El Vaporcito in happier days, chuntering up the
Guadalete. Courtesy of photaki.com.

Anyhow, let’s cut to the chase. El Puerto has a regular ferry service to Cádiz, for more information click here. For a satellite image of the Bay of Cádiz, click here. This weekend, my Dark Lady who knows that I’m addicted to boat rides (there is nothing to beat a bracing ferry ride across the Mersey on a blustery winter’s day), treated me to a ferry ride to Cádiz. It was almost a decade since we had last made the journey on the Vaporcito, or Little Steamer, that used to ply the route.

And thereby hangs a rather sad and sorry tale. Launched in 1955, the wooden-hulled

El Vaporcito, afer its encounter with
a breakwater. Courtesy of El Mundo.es

 Vaporcito merrily transported passengers across the bay until August 2011 when it hit a breakwater, struggled pluckily into the port of Cádiz and sank – fortunately without loss of life or injury. A few days later it was raised and taken to a shipyard for repairs. The shipyard promptly went belly-up and the boat was seized by the yard’s creditors. Since then several attempts have been made to rebuild it, but Byzantine court cases among shareholders, the Regional Government and anyone else who cares to join in has left the Vaporcito literally high, if not completely dry.

El vaporcito, awaiting the decision of the courts.
Courtesy of Vanesa de la Cruz.

So today we went on one of the four catamarans that cross the bay (€5.30 return). All of them are modern, fibreglass vessels and are not of any real aesthetic interest. The interest lies in the crossing, not the medium. We wanted to do a Kate Winslet à la Titanic, but unfortunately the prow is permanently roped off.

Once out of the Guadalete, we got a magnificent view of the new cable-stayed bridge, La Pepa,  so called after the 1812 Spanish Constitution signed in  in Cádiz on March 19th, Saint Joseph’s day, Pepa being

View of La Pepa. Courtesy of Vanesa de la Cruz.

the nickname for Josephine. In its time, La Pepa was the most progressive constitution in Europe. It even, gulp, gave women the vote! 

Cádiz was the only provincial capital not to fall into the hands of the French during the Peninsular War. As such, it became the temporary capital city of Spain. Under siege from the French on the landward side, the jolly Jack Tars of the Royal Navy kept maritime communications open. This is the historical backdrop to winner of the Crime Writers' Association's International Dagger, Arturo Pérez Reverte's best-selling and highly absorbing thriller El Asedio, in English The Siege, 

When finished, La Pepa will be the second bridge connecting the isthmus of Cádiz to the mainland. Immediately in front of us we could see the Muelle Pesquero de Cádiz basin which gives onto the lively Plaza San Juan de Dios presided over by Cádiz Town Hall.

This basin is also the port of call for cruise liners, as mentioned in a previous post and today we were lucky enough to see a sailing cruise ship, the Sea Cloud II from Valetta.

Sea Cloud II from Plaza San Juan de Dios

After coffee in the plaza and a walk around the city we wended our way back to the dock to get the boat back to El Puerto and thence home to Sanlúcar by car. Today, the views across the bay had been stunning – we could even see inland across the bay, past Rota, home to the US Navy’s Seventh Fleet, as far as the town of Trebujena[2], some 24 miles distant, and the wind turbines outside Sanlúcar. All in all, it was a most enjoyable day in the best of company. We hope to repeat the experience this winter when the crossing will be rougher. What could be more invigorating? 

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[1] Alberti was an intimate friend of Dalí, Luis Buñuel and Lorca. This latter (when not dressing up as a nun and riding around the Barcelona trams with his aforementioned chums) would probably have faded into obscure mediocrity had he not been murdered in a rather savage manner by the Nationalists during the Spanish Civil War, thus becoming  a martyr for left-wing trendies and a reliable cash cow for certain tousle-headed Irish academics. 

BTW, when making meatballs, Lorca's family cook would press the patties of meat in her armpits to give them that extra little je ne sais quoi.

[2] Trebujena's rice paddies were made famous in Spielberg’s film Empire of the Sun. What the viewer sees as a sunrise was, in fact, a sunset played backwards. It has to be said, though, that the town definitely looks better when there’s a good 24 miles' distance between it and yourself.

The noblest prospect a right-minded Englishman living in Seville ever sees is the road that leads him to anywhere outside that particular nest of complacent narrow-mindedness.

A truly welcome sight for escapees from
Miarmaland (Seville)

Please excuse my misquoting Samuel Johnson's famous saying "The noblest prospect a Scotsman ever sees is the road the leads him to England".

So, this weekend I escaped yet again to Cádiz and have had many an adventure. Perhaps the most memorable was a 1-hour long conversation with 3 cooking-wine-drinking gentlemen in a small square near the municipal market and who between them boasted a grand total of 9 teeth - 3 each. How about that for share and share alike?

Conversation ranged from the wisdom (or lack of same)of mixing Coca Cola with gin, instead of Tonic,  to the Spanish Civil War, the Phoenicians, and the use of Sherry barrels to age Scotch whisky. One of my new-found friends used to be a cellarman in a Sherry bodega until it went bust. I suspect that he probably took most of the production home with him in his gut, leaving the empty barrels to be sold onto Scotch distillers.

They invited me to share their cheap white wine and hard-won ciggies. I declined both, claiming that I didn't smoke and that 10.30 in the morning was a tad too early to be drinking alcohol. Both refusals were taken in good part. I did however share in their breakfast brought to them by a waiter from a nearby bar. A rather disconcerting question: did I look like I might be a new addition to the band? Perhaps I was going to be inducted into a secret brotherhood whose initiation ceremony included the chiselling out of all of one's teeth except for 3 front lowers! 

Walking through the narrow, yet luminous, streets of Cádiz you can perceive a certain feeling of expectancy; the feeling that anything is possible. Whatever it is, there is a certain surreal undertow to the situation. You feel that things are not quite right, that time or reality is slightly out of kilter. I insist, I did not drink any of the wine! My theory is that this is due to the fact that we are talking about a true seaport; there is a refreshing openness here - a stark contrast to the inward-looking city of Seville where time stopped in the 16th century. The Sevillian mentality has fossilised, while Cádiz, like my own beloved Liverpool, is quite simply mental. There is a refreshing madness in the air and you suspect nothing is quite what it seems - except,  perhaps, the dog poo if you step in it.

A good example of how Seville is a self-centred city full of self-centred people (the Spanish word is ombliguista, literally navel-staring) is its April Fair. This is a celebration of all that is Sevillian - closed groups who save up all year to rent a small marquee with a security guard on the door prohibiting entry to all who are not members or who do not have invitations (unless it's the guard's own cousins). The result? crowds of people wandering about the Feria ground, threading their way through vomit, puddles of horse piss and and steaming piles of equine shit. Meanwhile the fortunate ones look on impassively from behind a fence and drink overpriced Sherry and beer, and are deafened by low-quality music played on even lower quality stereos. 

Another example - and one that really grinds my gears even after 27 years in Seville: people simply push past you without so much as an excuse me. Not so in Cádiz where people open doors for each other and even say "excuse me".  

I must, in all fairness however, mention the breathtaking arrogance and bad manners of a Gibraltarian Bobby who whistled to me and snapped his fingers at me like a dog the last time I went to Gib (the Spanish can have it for all I care. Full of money-launderers and drug traffickers, it is a scandal to the good name of Great Britain). After obediently pulling over, I remonstrated with him. He apologised and told me he had thought I was Spanish because of the plates on my car, thus compounding his offensiveness. I immediately demanded to see his superior officer. 

The next post will be less vitriolic and will concentrate either on my journey down to Cádiz or on its magnificent provincial museum.