How did the Phoenicians found Gadir, today's Cádiz?

The Phoenicians found Gadir

Los fenicios fundan Gadir

c. 8th century BC. Sailors from Tyre, in today's Lebanon, founded a trading post on an island off the Atlantic coast and called it Gadir, 'the walled place': today's Cádiz.

Where: Spain, Cádiz, Andalusia

What happened

Sailors from Tyre, in today's Lebanon, founded a trading post on an island off the Atlantic coast and called it Gadir, 'the walled place': today's Cádiz. Ancient writers put its founding around 1100 BC, eighty years after the Trojan War, but the oldest Phoenician houses archaeologists have found there date from the late ninth century BC, so the real date is more likely around 800 BC. The Phoenicians came for the silver and metals of the culture the Greeks called Tartessos, in the lower Guadalquivir valley. Cádiz likes to call itself the oldest city in Western Europe.

Say it

Cádiz es una de las ciudades más antiguas de Europa.

Cádiz is one of the oldest cities in Europe.

Why it matters

Gadir tied the far west to the Mediterranean trading world a thousand years before Spanish existed; Cádiz, Málaga and Ibiza all began as Phoenician ports, and the alphabet the Phoenicians carried is the ancestor of the one Spanish uses.

Connected

Sources

  1. Gadir revisited. A proposal for reconstruction of the archaic Phoenician foundation — Universidad de Cádiz (research portal)
  2. Tartessos — World History Encyclopedia
  3. Second Punic War — World History Encyclopedia