Venetia Welby is following the Iberian trail of two intrepid female ancestors in 1851-2, using their Victorian diaries to explore modern Spain. Here is an extract from a chapter on Cadiz.
A new day sees me storming through the cobbled streets and squares with my suitcase, small yet noisy with a broken wheel, ruining everyone’s breakfast. It is Friday, May 1, a bank holiday banned by Franco and reintroduced in 1977, and the place is as sleepy as it was noisy upon my arrival. In the UK, this holiday will take place on Monday and for the first time ever, the banks will open. Again, I wonder how the beloved siesta can survive in this global climate.
Cadiz is beautiful, dazzlingly so in the midday sun, and against the translucent, bright blue sea on all sides and at the end of every street. Known as Little Havana, the city that was the template for Spanish architectural ventures across the Atlantic now has a similar tone of faded grandeur as its buildings are gradually worn by the sea air, full of the salt that lends sherry its saline tang and the Gaditanos their irreverent zest.
I walk through Plaza de la Mina, still much as in Emmeline’s day “a bowery, flowery, green, umbrageous locality,” though more rigorously staffed with tapas bars and cafés, to the Alameda, the seafront promenade where my travellers admired “the lovely faces and forms of the Gaditanas, as they walk so airily there”. They were much taken with the women of Cadiz: “Very beautiful are their glancing, dark-blazing eyes, and their smoothly-festooned locks, that shine in the sun like waves of molten jet”. But it is the ubiquitous fan that most animates them: “It seems doubtful if a Spanish woman could walk, talk, breathe, see, hear, think, feel, love, or live without her fan”.
Trying to eye up the modern, fanless Gaditana women for comparison, I can’t help but be distracted by some gigantic trees. They have the girth of twenty women. These, it transpires, are giant ficus trees and their boisterously entwined roots seem to be elbowing their way beneath the neighbouring sea wall, only restored in 1928.
And what of the “famous” Plaza del Mar, “the great sea-market – and the very soul – of Cadiz”? This place no longer appears on the map. Here, Emmeline discovered, “you may chance to see a gathering of many nations, and hear a gabbling of many tongues. Here, if you have luck, you will behold muleteers, fortune-tellers, water-sellers, gipsies,” not to mention smugglers, charcoal burners, donkey-drivers, sailors, soldiers, grasshoppers and birds for sale, “bright-coloured, plumy strangers”, Spanish, French, Germans, Portugese, Dutch, “Moors” – and lots of fat Brits: “That fat lady hard by makes the very air look adipose around her. She is English to her back-bone”. Even the poor woman’s laugh is described as “obese”.
Though the Plaza del Mar seems to have vanished, there is a market in Cadiz, the Mercado Central de Abastos, built in 1838. It is not by the sea, nor in that square though, but in Plaza de la Libertad, next to Plaza de las Flores, replete with flower sellers, freidurias offering cones of deep-fried seafood, cafés displaying windowfuls of cakes, “Vapio” selling nicotine inhalers, and a health supplement shop. There is nobody in the latter. The accents around me are many, though the grasshoppers are few. The market itself is a grand and colonnaded building taking up most of the neighbouring square. Here is the “great variety of the finny tribe” that my ancestors saw, and here is “El Dorado, the lunated gilt-head, thus named from its golden-glancing eyes and colouring”. The wanderers had read the accounts of Richard Ford, and were on the look-out for this fish which “washed down with equally golden sherry, and softly bedewed by a little tomato sauce” they gathered would be “some pumpkins”, a bizarre term of approval I plan to bring back into circulation. I’m fascinated, too, by the boxes of clams, their tentacled heads slithering out of their shells and sending high arcing jets of water at each other. As I peer closer with my camera, one shoots me squarely on the lens.
Later, I reach Plaza de San Juan de Dios, “among the most crowded and busy places in this town” in 1852. Not so today, perhaps because it is a bank holiday. A sign sheds some light on the grasshopper-flogging Plaza del Mar’s whereabouts. It was just here, behind a stretch of wall closing off the seafront, that traders gathered to sell exotic produce from South America. But by the end of the twentieth century, many Spanish colonies had gained their independence and fewer goodies made the crossing. The Mercado Central, largely ignored until that point, was revamped in 1926 and took over as the main market. I squint at the all but deserted square and imagine my grandmothers whispering rude jokes about their fellow, fatter, tourists guzzling the bounty of the Spanish empire.
Later still, in a café in a street lined with cafés in La Viña, the old fishermen’s district, I meet with “El Dorado”, gilthead bream advertised on a blackboard with traditional tomato accompaniment, piriñaca. I eat it “lubricated with golden sherry”, as advised by Ford, though it is unclear whether he means me or the fish. I am transported by its deliciousness and by a Gaditana who walks through the street singing at the top of her voice. Rather than studiously ignoring the loony, eyes fixedly down, as would happen in London, the “good cits” of Cadiz open their windows to join in with her, and several people leave their houses and tables to sway in the street and sing together.