When we arrived in Cadiz, we opted to go into the marina as we don’t yet have an outboard for Toodle-Pip! The marina is a mile or so outside the main city, so we used our bikes on a daily basis to cycle into town, then locked them up and went exploring by foot.

What a lovely city – full of narrow streets and alleyways and bustling with activity as Cadiz is very much on the Cruise Ship routes which are now coming back after Covid. The city is very much geared towards tourism, and the busyness somewhat added to the atmosphere of the place. The market square with it’s many vendors was a popular destination and the surrounding bars and restaurants offered lots of opportunity to people watch.

The view from the top of the cathedral is great – right up until the clock strikes – it’s deafening and quite a surprise!

 

 

 

 

 

 

We had fun touring around trying to follow some rather poorly marked walking routes painted on the streets in various colours and they pretty much covered the entire town.

We met up with new OCC members Ford and Michelle and their Jack Russel Issy on s/y Jeanne, a 39ft catamaran, and met up with them for a fun evening at one of the many restaurants in the city.

Neither one of us speak Spanish, but we managed to get by in restaurants in which we couldn’t understand the menu by resorting to the tactic of ordering a number of Tapas and asking the server to pick them for us. It never failed to produce a very tasty meal – and we really enjoyed the more out of the way places which had a local feel to them. In fact, at the first place we ventured into, we ended up standing at the bar while eating our food!

After feeling that we had pretty much covered the city, we opted to head over to the anchorage to fraternize with s/y Jeanne. We’re not really catamaran people, finding the hulls to be claustrophobic (unless you buy an enormous one), but Jeanne, the smallest cat we’d ever been on was certainly our favorite and despite her relatively small size, she was not claustrophobic in any way. We had a lovely evening aboard.

We rowed to the small marina close to the anchorage and went for an explore – in the end walking all the way to the old city – a bit of a hike – where we had another great Tapas selection at a popular restaurant. On the way back we stopped at a very large grocery store and stocked up on much needed essentials.

Cadiz had not been on either of our radars as a place to visit, but it was a delightful surprise – we really enjoyed our 10 day sojourn. Tomorrow, we’ll weigh anchor and head to the Gudiana River which separates Spain and Portugal.