In 67 BC, Julius Caesar visited Cadiz, a city on the southern tip of Spain.
It’s said that he saw a statue of Alexander the Great and that Caesar, then 33, began to cry.
His friends asked him why he was crying.
”Do you not think," he said, according to one translation of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, "it is matter for sorrow that while Alexander, at my age, was already king of so many peoples, I have as yet achieved no brilliant success?”
Alexander had died at age 32. Caesar would achieve at least some of the success he craved before he was assassinated at 55.
There’s no way to tell if this story is true, nor whether it was a moment that encouraged Caesar to approach his quest for glory with newfound vigour.
But the timing is right, Caesar was in Spain in from 69 BC until 67 BC. He would be back a few years later and would be, for a time, the governor of the Roman province that included Cadiz, then known Gades, which was an important centre.
Cadiz was already ancient by then. The Phoenicians had established the city more than 1,000 years before Caesar arrived.
In Greek and Roman legend, the city was said to have been founded by Hercules, after he split the contents of Europe and Africa apart.
It is not to far from here, that the Strait of Gibraltar reaches its narrowest point – 14.3 kilometres.
That is perhaps why, by the time Caesar arrived, the city had already been visited by another great general, Hannibal, who used it as a supply base as he headed north, famously crossing the Alps with his army and its elephants on his way to Italy.
Cadiz would come to prominence again during the Peninsular War, when it became the the headquarters of the Spanish resistance to French conquest.
But we are just here to party.
After two weeks in Morocco, even the ferry between Tangier and Tarifa is a different country, with cans of beer and bottles of wine sold openly.
Men still sit outside establishments where all the chairs face forward, towards the street, but here they drink beer instead of coffee.
We stay in an art deco-inspired beach town. There’s a highway near where we’re staying where a McDonald’s sits across from a Burger King. It feels like America. In old city of El Puerto de Santa María, the small bars remind me of Joburg, of Parktown North and Melville. But the streets, the quiet pedestrianized streets of the old city at least, don’t feel like Johannesburg.
Of course the difference between conservative Morocco and libertine Spain is only accentuated by the Carnival, a festival of excess and drunkenness that comes before the sacrifices of lent.
Here too, is something ancient, a tradition preserved by the youth.
The Cadiz carnival feels like a festival but it has no centre. The festivals of Montreal have a focal point, there is a stage, there is organization, the carnival is chaos, costumed people wandering streets with no real destination in mind. Performances that appear spontaneously and then disappear back into the crowd.
We eat fried calamari, patatas bravas and ham. They say the reason ham is such a part of Spanish cuisine, the reason people keep a leg of Jamón Ibérico in their homes, is that during the reconquista, and the inquisition that followed, the public and conspicuous consumption of ham was a way for the Conversos – Jews who converted to Christianity to avoid prosecution – and Moriscos – Muslims who did the same – to prove to the authorities that they were not secretly practicing their old religion behind closed doors as many were suspected to do.
We call the old city of Cadiz, surrounded by the modern world of highways, ports and wide streets, the medina, it seems fitting, it is narrow and curving, a world where you keep coming back to the same places – an old market, the square in front of the cathedral – but even after three days can turn a corner and find yourself somewhere where you have never been before.
We have paella in a small restaurant near the coast, only to find that we’d had better paella in Morocco. More bars in Morocco serve tapas free with drinks than in Spain, at least where we go. Morocco and Spain may be more similar than they first appear.
Spanish beer, though, is better and Spanish wine cheaper.
Like everyone, we drink openly on the street, not hidden behind closed doors in dark smoky rooms like in Morocco.
We sit on the seawall as the sun goes down and celebrate.
I see no statues of Alexander and have no regrets.