Back to being a tourist today, we were booked on the 10am bus, Cartagena is 45 mins away by bus, straight along the A 7 freeway. We left the valley of Murcia & past a large number of market gardens & citrus groves before arriving in the port city. A number of bus stations we’ve arrived into had a tourist information booth, Cartagena didn’t, I was keen to find a map as I knew where we wanted to visit but had been unsuccessful with google maps at working out the order / route, still like a physical map for that. My plan was to take the map to the coffee shop & plan the rest of the day. We were booked to return on the 4pm bus. Even though I didn’t have a map we set off to the coffee shop, we’d walked about 20 mins when I realised I had no map & we seemed to be walking away from the historical town centre (we were heading to the sister cafe of the one I’d been going to in Murcia). I decided I needed to go back to my original plan of getting a map & then having a coffee whilst planning the route (note to self, try to get map before or if not then map 1st, coffee 2nd!)
Luckily we hadn’t walked too much out of our way, map in hand & already having ticked off one of the places I wanted to see (the 100 year-old town hall, its triangular, a response to the mining boom in the late-19th century, the facade is entirely made of white marble and topped with domes that are coated with local zinc. It does have a few bullet holes from the Civil War. Unfortunately only tours can enter so I didn’t get to see the exhibit of period tapestries). Over coffee, a Spanish milky coffee which wasn’t too bad, Richard & I plotted out our route. Next stop was the Mvseo Teatromano de Cartagena, the Roman Theatre museum which was really good.
The theatre is 2,000 years old and was discovered recently in 1988 beneath the ruins of the Old Cathedral, which had been destroyed during shelling in the Spanish Civil War. About two thirds of the theatre’s building material was still on site, meaning a very detailed restoration was possible. The museum houses artefacts discovered during the excavations, including an altar to Jupiter, a statue of Apollo, inscribed lintels, plaques and also Islamic ceramics from the middle ages. The final part of the museum takes you through to the theatre, which was built into the side of a hill, the Romans were so clever, the theatre had a curtain that would have been lowered in front of the stage, an orchestra pit & even an area for scenery. Amazing.
We exited the theatre & carried on up the hill, past the facade of St. Maria la Vieja church & up to the Castillo de la Conception to enjoy the panoramic views across the port & Cartagena. We then headed to the Spanish Civil War Museum, the war from 1936-39 was one of the darkest moments in Spain’s history, and Cartagena didn’t escape the destruction. The city was a Republican military stronghold, and well defended from sea. This made it a target of bombing raids by the Nationalist forces (with help from the Nazis & Italians, Hitler & Mussolini both tested out their war machine, especially the blitzkreig & their total war against civilians) the museum is housed in a shelter built into the hill, there were a large number like this one were built around the city. The museum makes you appreciate what people had to do to survive and included original signs, propaganda posters and other artefacts. As we still had a couple of items on our list we looked for a bakery to get something for lunch. We settled on a couple of pastry items & we weren’t sure what they were, luckily the donuts looked nice & I added one donut into the order, we found a bench in the sun & Richard bit into the pastry & it contained red pepper, along with potato & carrot, Richard said they were really nice, I ate most of the donut, which was really nice, I did save Richard a mouthful.
We then headed to Calle Mayor, paved with blue marble & walked along past Cervantes House, the facade was white, Richard commented it was like a wedding cake, it includes white Belvederes typical of Cartagena, next was Casino, again a private club in the 18th century style, then Gran Hotel with influences from Vienna & France, the colours used vary from floor to floor & last was Dorda House with its Baroque inspiration. We found a shop & I purchased a dried fruit & nut mix & we headed back to the townhall, there are a number of facades of buildings, which look great from the front but behind are held up with girders. We had time for a walk along the port area, we then looked for a toilet, public toilets are quite hard to find so we headed back to the bus station & then walked along the walls before heading back to the station to catch our bus. We dropped into the supermarket for milk & came home. Dinner was cold chicken, baked potato & salad. I wrote my travel diary. After dinner we watched an episode of Black Earth Rising.