Checked out of our hotel and headed down to Cadiz.
I can’t tell you much about Cadiz I’m afraid. We downloaded an app with geolocation which was nifty in that it could direct us around town and tell us the buildings and monuments we were looking at, but there was no introduction to the city itself.
A quick squizz on Wikipedia tells me it’s an ancient port city and one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in Western Europe (where have I heard that before??) established by the Phoenicians. It looks like an island connected to the mainland by a fancy bridge that appears new. It seems fairly wealthy and well preserved, with a medieval heart of narrow streets and lots of lovely squares with statues and monuments.
I had an exciting nonverbal interaction with a local at one point as we meandered through the city. I jaywalked across a road, and as I did so I heard a car horn in the distance. I didn’t think it was anything to do with me but it was continuous and it got louder and louder. As I got to the other side I looked back in surprise to see an elderly man driving past very cross and red in the face, pointing angrily at his eye. Yes, I’d crossed on the red light, but he was miles away, he couldn’t have hit me if he’d put his foot down and tried as hard as he could. I was too dismayed to do anything but goggle as he drove by. He really did seem most affronted. Not sure what the eye pointing gesture meant, either. Look where you’re going? I’ve got my eye on you? Very odd.
We had tapas for lunch in a charming little restaurant that was well reviewed and mostly filled with locals. The tourists were generally eating outside in the squares.
After lunch we drove back up to Seville, where we will be spending the next few days. We dropped the car off at Avis but the man said since we’d filled the car up 30 k out of town we’d have to pay for an entire tank of petrol, not just the amount it would need to top it up. None of us had ever heard of such a rule but since it was nearly full we did as he recommended, drove it back out, went to the nearest petrol station, filled it up again and brought it back. What a kerfuffle and a waste of half an hour in 30 degree heat. The other option they’d given us when we first picked the car up in Lisbon was to return it empty, but can you imagine how stressful doing that would have been?
Anyway, once the car was finally dropped off we Ubered to our accommodation, a gorgeous character hotel in the middle of town. Our room is number 13 but it’s called “Alcazar” and doesn’t have the number 13 written everywhere, which seems very superstitious. All the other rooms are numbered, not named.
There is a big chain of Spanish department stores called El Corte Inglés, bizarrely enough. There is one just down the road from our hotel, and it has some restaurants on the top floor. We had dinner there just now, on the roof top terrace. Another al fresco meal, fabulous.