Cartagena

Cartagena, though more crowded today and with a reviving tourist industry to augment its maritime and dwindling mining economy, remains a dirty port city with seedy characters prowling the streets and smells wafting from one alley to the next that certainly don’t come from a bakery. The upside is that stolid monuments, or remains of monuments, stand as a testament to Cartagena’s triumphant seafaring days. Writing his Ora Maritimo in the fourth century AD, one of the earliest surviving documents of the Iberian Peninsula, Roman Rufo Festo tells of the city, then called Mastia, founded by the Carthaginian general Asdrúbal in 227 BC. It was a great maritime center during the Roman occupation from the third century BC to the second century, then fell in succession to the Vandals, Visigoths and the Moors, until the Christians reconquered the city in 1245.

A stroll through Cartagena introduces small pictures of these past cultures, embedded in the largely Baroque and Neoclassical architecture that has prevailed since the city was largely rebuilt following its destruction during the Cantonal Revolution of 1873. Of the Carthaginian reign there is a Punic bulwark, what’s left of it, dating to the founding of the city in 227 BC. The pieces formed part of a series of parallel walls with a gap of 18 feet between them that was likely connected by a high walkway encircling the earliest Punic city of Qart-Hadast. This discovery, made just 10 years ago, is off the rotary in Plaza Almirante Bastarreche.

The Romans left a formidable imprint with the ruins at Empuríes and a handful of singular monuments scattered throughout the country like Segovia’s massive aqueduct – and on their city of Carthago-Nova, the proof of which continues to be unearthed, paved over, then unearthed again. These include a Roman road dating to the Augustian era discovered in the 1970s near Plaza Merced; the Augusteum, remains of two public buildings likely used for religious purposes as early as the first century AD; a colonnade indicating a former Roman thoroughfare at the base the hill of Molinete, which itself has been a continually productive excavation revealing parts of a tower, forum and a podium once part of a first-century temple, and the Torre Ciega, which once rose above a Roman necropolis. It is called the blind tower because it lacks windows. There is a carefully excavated Roman theater, discovered in the late ’80s carved into the side of Concepción Hill, and an amphitheater, which is covered by the city’s Plaza de Toros (bullring) and only partially visible in places.

The Christians borrowed stones from the amphitheater when they built their castle atop Concepción Hill during the reign of King Henry III (1390-1406). For their Catedral de Santa María La Vieja, which dates to the 13th century, they borrowed stones from the Roman theater. What hasn’t been left out in the cold is preserved in the Museo Arqueológico Municipal, built atop the remains of a fourth-century Roman necropolis and housing archeological finds from the earliest inhabitants of the region of Murcia. Besides the Paleolithic weapons and votive vases, the Roman collection is the highpoint, with mosaics, grave stone, tools and funeral epigraphs.

In 1728, Cartagena was named as capital of the Mediterranean Maritime Department. An arsenal was constructed in the town, defensive ramparts were improved and the city grew rapidly. Monuments dating to this era include the Neo-Classical Muralla del Mar Campus, a military hospital built between 1749 and 1762; the Midshipman’s School, once a naval barracks and now office space for naval officers; and the dockyard gate, what’s left of the defensive wall reconstructed during this period of growth and since topped by a clock tower. The Museo Arqueológico Maritimo shows artifacts of the ancient naval trade, pieces of shipwrecked boats, amphorae, coins and a collection 13 giant elephant tusks found with Phoenician inscription in a nearby wreckage.

The Naval Museum displays scale models of ships, nautical charts, the usual ropes and attire, and it has a room dedicated to Isaac Peral. Peral was responsible for building Spain’s first submarine in 1884, which is on display down the Pasel Alfonso XII from the Naval Museum. As a side note, the world’s first functioning submarine was constructed by the Dutch inventor Cornelius van Drebel in 1624.