Cadiz: The Story of Europe’s Oldest City
Helen Crisp & Jules Stewart, Hurst, £25

CITIES are touted to us by the tourism industry and its media channels through excitable superlatives. Cheapest, coolest, best for walking, most Instagrammed, top this, top that; it seems to sell. Cadiz’s claim to be Europe’s oldest city is perhaps less saleable, as well as hard to prove. Plovdiv, Athens and Vinkovci — and no doubt others — are worthy rivals. What’s more interesting is Cadiz’s deep history, its multilayered past, which is a direct consequence of its location.

On a European map, Cadiz looks marginal in the extreme — on the edge of the continent, far from Spain’s capital (Tangier is much closer), and from Europe’s principal historic centres of power. Zoom in and you’ll see the city occupies a peninsula, as if it wanted to sail away. But in which direction? To Africa, the Eastern Mediterranean or the Atlantic and America? Cadiz looks, and has been pulled in, many directions.

This is the story told in Helen Crisp and Jules Stewart’s thorough, solid, well-written portrait of Cadiz. They guide us, like reliable captains, through the maritime origins and early settlements and skirmishes that led to the rise of a port city on the edge of the Iberian Peninsula. The Phoenicians called it Gadir, meaning “stronghold” or “compound”; it’s likely the earliest port was related to the colony of Tartessos — much shrouded in myths, and linked to both Atlantis and Hercules. For four centuries Cadiz was part of the Carthaginian territory of southern Spain.