History

Phoenician anthropoid sarcophagi (400–470 BC) found in Cádiz, thought to have been imported from the Phoenician homeland around Sidon (now in the Museum of Cádiz)

Founded as Gadir or Agadir by Phoenicians from Tyre, Cádiz is often regarded as the most ancient city still standing in Western Europe. The Phoenicians established a port in the 7th century BC.

Traditionally, its founding is dated to c. 1100 BC, although no archaeological strata on the site can be dated earlier than the 9th century BC. One resolution for this discrepancy has been to assume that Gadir was merely a small seasonal trading post in its earliest days.

The expeditions of Himilco around Spain and France and of Hanno around Western Africa began there. The Phoenician settlement traded with Tartessos, a city-state whose exact location remains unknown but is thought to have been somewhere near the mouth of the Guadalquivir River.

One of the city's notable features during antiquity was the temple on the south end of its island dedicated to the Phoenician god Melqart, who was conflated with Hercules by the Greeks and Romans under the names "Tyrian Hercules" and "Hercules Gaditanus". It had an oracle and was famed for its wealth. In Greek mythology, Hercules was sometimes credited with founding Gadeira after performing his tenth labor, the slaying of Geryon, a monster with three heads and torsos joined to a single pair of legs. (A tumulus near Gadeira was associated with Geryon's final resting-place.) According to the Life of Apollonius of Tyana, the "Heracleum" (i.e., the temple of Melqart) was still standing during the 1st century. Some historians, based in part on this source, believe that the columns of this temple were the origin of the myth of the "pillars of Hercules".

Votive statues of Melqart-Hercules from the Islote de Sancti Petri

The city fell under the sway of Carthage during Hamilcar Barca's Iberian campaign after the First Punic War. Cádiz became a depot for Hannibal's conquest of southern Iberia, and he sacrificed there to Hercules/Melqart before setting off on his famous journey in 218 BC to cross the Alps and invade Italy. Later the city fell to Romans under Scipio Africanus in 206 BC. Under the Roman Republic and Empire, the city flourished as a port and naval base known as Gades. Suetonius relates how Julius Caesar, when visiting Gades as a quaestor (junior senator), saw a statue of Alexander the Great there and was saddened to think that he himself, though the same age, had still achieved nothing memorable.

The Bay of Cádiz in antiquity featuring a notably different coastline.

The people of Gades had an alliance with Rome and Julius Caesar bestowed Roman citizenship on all its inhabitants in 49 BC. By the time of Augustus's census, Cádiz was home to more than five hundred equites (members of the wealthy upper class), a concentration rivaled only by Patavium (Padua) and Rome itself. It was the principal city of the Roman colony of Augusta Urbs Julia Gaditana. An aqueduct provided fresh water to the town (the island's supply was notoriously bad), running across open sea for its last leg. However, Roman Gades was never very large. It consisted only of the northwest corner of the present island, and most of its wealthy citizens maintained estates outside of it on the nearby island or on the mainland. The lifestyle maintained on the estates led to the Gaditan dancing girls becoming infamous throughout the ancient world.

Although it is not in fact the most westerly city in the Spanish peninsula, for the Romans Cádiz had that reputation. The poet Juvenal begins his famous tenth satire with the words: Omnibus in terris quae sunt a Gadibus usque Auroram et Gangen ('In all the lands which exist from Gades as far as Dawn and the Ganges...').

The overthrow of Roman power in Hispania Baetica by the Visigoths in the 400s saw the destruction of the original city, of which there remain few remnants today. The site was later reconquered by Justinian in 551 as part of the Byzantine province of Spania. It would remain Byzantine until Leovigild's reconquest in 572 returned it to the Visigothic Kingdom.