I eat too much. When we are on holiday especially. Today was no exception.

Intending to locate the Roman theatre we walked to the sea wall which faces the Atlantic. A few metres along the coastline there’s a rather dilapidated fenced off area which contains the ruins of a Roman amphitheatre. It all looked rather sad. No doubt it’s waiting for funding to be properly developed into an ‘attraction’.

If you walk further east along the sea wall, you come to the first proper beach, which had a fair proportion of surfers, body boarders and people falling in the sea. Neither of us had bothered to pack swimwear so unfortunately we couldn’t try to ‘catch a wave’. We wandered back through the Barrio Del Populo, along narrow streets with some of the houses showing blue plaques indicating where famous flamenco artists or matadors had been born. Soon we found ourselves back near the port and chanced upon a wedding. I don’t know what the collective noun for a gathering of large hats is, but we certainly had one this morning. There was a vintage Rolls Royce to whisk the bride and groom away, but not before they had been serenaded by a traditional Andalucian folk group. We crept off before the hat wearers began a whose brim is the biggest contest. It was about lunch time and we found an Argentinian place to sate our hunger pangs. A sharing pork dish took our eye and we ordered that, some berenjenas and potatoes (which turned out to be chips). The waitress turned up with a large charcoal burner containing a sizzling array of pork bits. I say ‘bits’ advisedly as some were not readily identifiable.

We really should have tried to walk the meal off but a much needed siesta was probably more important so we got back to the apartment before falling asleep on a park bench and attracting the attention of the ‘gaurdia civil.’

I’m not sure what the length of a Spanish siesta is, but we woke up some time later and around 8pm decided to mark our last evening in Cadiz with yet another meal. It must be said that being able to walk around of an evening in the middle of October without a jacket is very agreeable. A few hundred other couples thought so too. However, locating a place to eat that was open before 9pm was problematic. Close to where the wedding had taken place we found a restaurant that was actually serving food. Oh dear, we ordered too much, no perhaps I ordered too much. The waitress placed my cutlery on the table ready for the ‘pork on a skewer’ so far apart you could have reversed an open top tourist bus into the space she left. When the pork arrived it would have been less of a chore to eat said tourist bus and half the tourists too. Susie’s salad choice looked small in comparison.

After wading my way through the skewered ingredients we were serenaded by a young guitarist who we rewarded with all of our loose change, about €1.50. Manfully I had an additional lemon sorbet and drank my coffee before we waddled off back through the crowds to the apartment.

Tomorrow we leave for Seville and we’ll be sad to say goodbye to Cadiz. It’s a place we’d both like to visit again….though next time avoiding the large pork dishes..