Cádiz 1812: the Constitution and the old town: a self-guided walk
By Alleytale
Spain's first liberal constitution, written in besieged Cádiz
From 1810 to 1812 Cádiz was besieged by French troops yet remained one of the few free cities in Spain, and the Cortes met here with deputies from Spain, the Americas and the Philippines. The walk links the buildings and squares tied to that moment with the merchant city around them.
The stops
This monument in the middle of Plaza de España was commissioned in 1912 to mark the centenary of the Constitution of 1812 and the Cortes of Cádiz, and was completed in 1929. Its lower level represents a chamber with an empty presidential armchair, and a pilaster rises above it as an allegory of the constitution's principles. The constitution was drafted at a time when Cádiz was one of the few free Spanish cities during the Peninsular War.
Photo: Zarateman — CC0 King Charles III had this neoclassical customs house built between 1770 and 1784, and it has been the seat of Cádiz's provincial council, the Diputación, since 1846. Spanish Wikipedia adds that it served as the palace of the Regency during the French siege. The Diputación's own archive explains that provincial councils exist because of article 325 of the Constitution of 1812, and that Cádiz's was constituted on 16 September 1813 under a decree of the Cortes.
Photo: Zarateman — CC0 Franciscan friars founded this convent in 1566, and its bell tower is dated 1699. It was a key point for training and sending friars to the Americas, the famous Junípero Serra among them. The Cortes that wrote the 1812 constitution likewise included deputies from Spanish America and the Philippines.
Photo: Zarateman — CC0 This square was laid out in 1838 on what had been the orchard and infirmary of the San Francisco convent. The city council set a statue of General Espoz y Mina, a hero of the War of Independence, at its centre, and the square took his name, first as Plaza General Espoz y Mina and then simply Mina. The statue has since gone, and the Museum of Cádiz now stands on the square.
Photo: Jmpuyana — CC BY-SA 4.0 After the Casa de Contratación moved here from Seville in 1717, the city's rich merchants built lookout towers, more than a hundred of which survive, and this is the most important of them. It became the port's official watchtower in 1778 because it stands on higher ground than its surroundings, and it is named for its first watchman, Antonio Tavira. A room inside covers the port, the trade routes to the colonies and the Cortes of 1812, and a camera obscura projects a panorama of the city.
Photo: Jmpuyana — CC BY-SA 4.0 Mayor Cayetano del Toro drove this museum as part of the city's celebration of the 1812 centenary, and it opened on 5 October 1912. The main hall holds Salvador Viniegra's huge painting of the proclamation of the Constitution, showing the fourth and last public reading of the text, on the afternoon of 19 March 1812 in the Plaza de San Felipe. A wooden model of Cádiz at 1:250, made for Charles III, shows the city as it was in the last quarter of the 18th century.
Photo: Pfrancop — CC BY-SA 4.0 As Napoleon's troops advanced, the Cortes moved from the Isla de León, today San Fernando, to Cádiz, and met in this elliptical baroque oratory, built between 1685 and 1719. A royal order of 1907 made it a national monument, calling it the place where the Constitution of 1812 was promulgated. Plaques on its outer walls, placed especially in 1912 for the centenary, honour the deputies. One of them, Ramón Power, the Puerto Rican deputy elected vice-president of the Cortes in 1810, died of yellow fever in 1813 and was first buried here.
Photo: Emilio J. Rodríguez Posada — CC BY-SA 2.0 Spanish Wikipedia records that the Constitution of 1812 was proclaimed in this square, which was named Plaza de la Constitución from 1812 to 1913 and again from 1931 to 1937. It began as the Campo de la Jara on the outskirts of the city, where a hermitage of San Antonio grew into the church that gave the square its later name. In 1820 it was also the scene of a bloody repression of the liberal movement.
Photo: Luis Rogelio HM — CC BY-SA 2.0 The Casino Gaditano, a club of the athenaeum type founded in 1844, has its seat in an 18th-century house that in the 19th century was a family home used for cultural gatherings. Its Moorish-style patio was built between August 1889 and June 1890, inspired by corners of the Alhambra and above all by the Patio de las Muñecas in Seville's Alcázar. Today the building also houses the Fundación Centro de Estudios Constitucionales 1812.
Photo: El Pantera — CC BY-SA 4.0 This small triangular square became the axis of a new quarter that began in 1755 and was finished around 1773. Spanish Wikipedia says the unemployed gathered here to pass around rumours and false news, so the shrine called the Cross of Truth gave the square an ironic nickname, the Plaza of the Cross of Lies, and the name Mentidero, a place for tall tales, stuck. About forty years after the square was finished, the Constitution of 1812 affirmed freedom of the press.
Photo: Vanbasten 23 — CC BY-SA 3.0 This seaside garden began as a neglected, treeless promenade nicknamed the parsley walk, and was enlarged from 1854 after a cholera epidemic, partly to give work to people in need. Mayor Eduardo José Genovés i Puig remodelled it in 1892 with fountains, a waterfall with a lake and many rare plants, and gave it his name. Among its busts and monuments is a bust of the botanist José Celestino Mutis, who was born in Cádiz in 1732 and sailed for Spanish America in 1760.
Photo: Luis Rogelio HM — CC BY-SA 2.0 After the Anglo-Dutch assault of 1596, Philip II ordered this fortress built by royal decree of October 1597, to plans by Cristóbal de Rojas; its pentagonal plan sends star-shaped points out into the sea. In 1769 Charles III made it a military prison for prominent prisoners, and Spanish Wikipedia lists liberals and Latin American independence supporters among those held. One was the Mexican independence leader Mariano Abasolo, sentenced to ten years here after his capture in 1811, who died in the castle on 14 April 1816.
Photo: Schwarzweisz — CC0
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