Cadiz; Saturday, 18 March, 2017

I had a quick breakfast in the hotel before heading out across the square to the Cathedral to start the day by looking round that. I took one of the quite in-depth audio guides and so had a pretty lengthy visit to the cathedral.

Leaving the cathedral I immediately went back inside, though through a different door and into one of the bell towers. It’s a pretty steep climb up the tower, made slightly easier by it being a ramped path almost the whole way to the top – just a short 15 step spiral staircase to reach the terrace at the top. From the top the views over the city were spectacular, made even more helpful by knowing what most of the things I was looking at were thanks to the previous days visit to the Camera Obscura.

I was pretty much done visiting and considering if I wanted to take some more photos from the top when I noticed the time – a couple of minutes to 12, and this being a bell tower I decided it would make a much wiser plan to get away from the bells before they started their longest peel of the day.

Back down on ground level with a minute or so to spare I headed over to a café on the square for a light lunch, and to listen to the bells going off from a safe distance. Lunch completed I wandered past the cathedral and had intended on visiting the Old Cathedral, which was replaced by the current one as it was too small, but I got there to find that it was closed with no indication if it was just for lunch or for the rest of the day, so instead I wandered round the corner to visit the Roman Theatre.

The theatre is the second largest Roman Theatre so far discovered, with only the one in Pompeii beating it for size. What remains is pretty impressive and would be even more so if everything had remained as it would have been closer to double the height that it is today.

After looking round the theatre I headed over to the port to pick up the open-top bus for a tour of the city, partly to see more and partly because it was getting quite warm to be walking around the city and I thought it would be nicer to be able to sit down in the sun and get a bit of a breeze as the bus moved.

I did a couple of circuits to take in all the sites and then wandered back through the old town to the hotel to freshen up ready for dinner.

I headed out for dinner just before 8pm and it turned out that this wasn’t the best of times. The cafes and bars were already full of people who had been there for a long time, and didn’t look like they were moving, and most of the restaurants were only just starting to put their tables out. In the end I walked for about 30 minutes around the old town area taking in the sites before returning to a very nice tapas restaurant I’d seen setting up to grab the last available table for dinner.

After a very nice dinner with a slight over-order on the olives I wandered back through the old town and to the hotel to turn in for an early night to give me time to digest.