Cartagena: Carthago Nova to the modernista age: a self-guided walk
By Alleytale
Carthago Nova to the 1900s
Carthago Nova's Roman house, forum and amphitheatre sit among an eighteenth-century palace and church and the modernista mansions that mining and trade fortunes paid for around 1900, and the architect Víctor Beltrí's name comes up again and again.
The stops
Carthago Nova's theatre was built between 5 and 1 BCE for some 6,000 spectators, set into the slope of the Concepción hill near the port so that it could be seen from the sea. After a fire, what was left standing was taken apart in the 5th century and its stones went into a market, and the old town grew over it until building works in 1988 set off the excavations that identified it two years later. Rafael Moneo planned how the remains would fit into the city, and the theatre and its museum were inaugurated in 2008.
Photo: Rafa Esteve — CC BY-SA 4.0 The old church of Santa María la Vieja stands on the hill of La Concepción and has been a ruin since 1939, when Cartagena was shelled by Nationalist forces in the Spanish Civil War. When the seat of the diocese was moved to Murcia, formalised in 1291, it became a parish church; Cartagena's city council never agreed to the move, and the name Old Cathedral only came into use from the eighteenth century. The Roman theatre below it came to light after building works began in 1988, and the church turned out to have been built over the upper part of the theatre, using some of its material.
Photo: Fernando — CC BY-SA 4.0 This Roman house of the 1st century BC takes its name from a Latin inscription at its back entrance, "Fortuna propitia", a wish of good luck for whoever came in. The archaeologist Pedro San Martín Moro found it in 1970 during building works for homes and a bank office, and the bank paid for the dig; Roman roads came to light at the same time. The square at its door, Plaza de Risueño, is named for Benigno Risueño de Amador (1802-1849), a liberal doctor born in Cartagena who had to go into exile in France, and the poet Antonio Oliver was born there in 1903.
Photo: Adam Jones from Kelowna, BC, Canada — CC BY-SA 2.0 The Flavian-era amphitheatre of Carthago Nova, apparently built over an earlier one of Republican date, was elliptical, partly cut into the hill, and is estimated to have held between 10,000 and 11,000 spectators. Unlike the theatre, its ruins were never hidden, and in the modern age the district was called Antigones for the ancient remains that turned up whenever anyone dug. In 1854 a bullring, built with convict labour from Cartagena's penal, was raised on the amphitheatre's stands; its last bullfight was in 1986, and in 2008 part of it began to be taken down so the Roman amphitheatre could be excavated.
Photo: Øyvind Holmstad — CC BY-SA 4.0 The mining entrepreneur Camilo Aguirre commissioned this modernist palace from Víctor Beltrí in 1898, after Beltrí's success with Casa Cervantes, and it was completed in 1901. On the façade, ceramic angels crown the top beside a bay window in Cartagena's tradition, sculpted bees, a popular modernist symbol of prosperity won through work, and a ceramic dome. Inside, the ballroom keeps its neo-rococo decoration and ceiling paintings by Cecilio Pla, an allegory of spring, and the building is now part of MURAM, the Regional Museum of Modern Art inaugurated in 2009.
Photo: Rafa Esteve — CC BY-SA 4.0 José Maestre Pérez, a businessman and politician with mines in the Cartagena-La Unión range, commissioned this house on Plaza de San Francisco in 1906 from the architect Marceliano Coquillat, and Víctor Beltrí directed the works. The stone façade is built around a central axis, with a curving stone bay in the middle and a neo-rococo main door, in a style much like Catalan modernisme, as in Gaudí's Casa Calvet or Salvador Vinyals's Casa Juncosa in Barcelona. In 1940 the family sold it to the Banco Hispano Americano for 500,000 pesetas, and the bank emptied the interior, keeping the façade, one room on the first floor, the skylights and the original staircase.
Photo: Enrique Freire — CC BY 2.0 This quarter of Carthago Nova was built around the Decumanus, a porticoed commercial street that linked the forum with the harbour area. Off it stood large baths on the slope of the Molinete hill, a sanctuary of the goddess Isis built in the mid-1st century AD and used until the 3rd century, and a two-storey building around a Tuscan atrium, identified as the seat of a collegium, with painted walls in every room. The restoration of the site won the Premio Nacional de Restauración y Conservación de Bienes Culturales in 2013.
Photo: Nanosanchez — CC BY-SA 3.0 This eighteenth-century house was built for the marquises of Pinares and takes its name from Cirilo Molina Cros, a lawyer who was twice mayor of Cartagena in the late 19th century and bought it in 1871. In 1923 it lodged King Alfonso XIII and Queen Victoria Eugenia when they came to inaugurate the monument to the Heroes of Cavite and the Club de Regatas. Its two façades, the main one on Calle de la Jara and the back one on Calle Honda, are sober, mixing baroque and neoclassical styles, and since 2000 the house has held the Centro Regional de Artesanía.
Photo: Tordo12 — CC BY-SA 4.0 The mining and trade magnate Celestino Martínez Vidal commissioned this hotel from the architect Tomás Rico Valarino; works began in 1907, and Víctor Beltrí took over the project at mezzanine level. The outside was standing by 1910, the date on the weathervane, but Martínez Vidal died in January 1911 and his sons had to settle a complicated inheritance, so the hotel opened only on 29 February 1916, considered at the time one of the best in Spain. Among that year's guests was Wilhelm Canaris, then a German naval officer working as a spy in the First World War.
Photo: Rafa Esteve — CC BY-SA 4.0 The plan for this church began in 1712, to remedy the shortcomings of the old cathedral and give the city a true diocesan church, so it was built with the form and dimensions of a cathedral. Work started in 1713 with 84,000 reales from the cathedral chapter, won by the support of Cardinal Belluga and Philip V, and the church was blessed on 5 December 1779. It is the nerve centre of Cartagena's Holy Week processions, was rebuilt in 1880 after the bombardment of the 1873 Cantonal Rebellion, and was restored in the neo-Baroque style in 1943 after the destruction of 1936.
Photo: Diego Delso — CC BY-SA 4.0 Esteban Llagostera, from a family of Catalan textile merchants settled in Cartagena, had Víctor Beltrí design this house on Calle Mayor between 1913 and 1916. Its façade is composed as a support for ceramic decoration by Gaspar Polo, with allegorical figures of Minerva and Mercury and the coats of arms of Cartagena, Murcia, Barcelona and Manlleu, and Pérez Rojas, writing in 1986, called it the most original and beautiful façade of twentieth-century Murcian architecture. Only the façade survives: the rest was demolished in 2010, and in 2016 the building works exposed harbour structures of the Roman colony of Cartago Nova from the 1st century BC.
Photo: Puntin1969 — CC BY 2.0 Serafín Cervantes Contreras, a mining magnate of the Cartagena-La Unión range, commissioned this house on Calle Mayor, and it opened on 26 February 1900 as Víctor Beltrí's first job in Cartagena. It was his first chance to bring Catalan modernisme to the port city, and it impressed so much that the city's bourgeoisie came to him with offers of work. The ground floor held the Café España, whose display of suspiros inspired the composer Antonio Álvarez Alonso in 1902 to title his pasodoble Suspiros de España.
Photo: Øyvind Holmstad — CC BY-SA 4.0 The old 16th-century town hall had become too small in the boom of the early 20th century, so the Palacio Consistorial was built on its site between 1900 and 1907 to designs by Tomás Rico Valarino. It is a triangular building with a white marble façade and zinc domes, decorated again and again with the city's emblems: the Castillo de la Concepción and the mural crown that Scipio Africanus is said to have granted when he took Carthago Nova. Built on unstable ground won from the sea, it suffered serious structural damage and closed in 1995, and its restoration, delayed eleven years by legal problems with the contractor, was finished in 2006.
Photo: Rafa Esteve — CC BY-SA 4.0
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