Cartagena

Overview

Cartagena is a working naval port on the southeast coast of Spain, 30 km south of Murcia city, built over a Carthaginian and Roman city that keeps resurfacing under its streets. Walking the old town costs nothing. Almost everything you would want to go inside belongs to Cartagena Puerto de Culturas, the municipal operator that runs the theatre museum, the hill castle, the forum park and seven other sites on one set of tickets.

What makes the place worth a detour is density. Inside a fifteen-minute walk you get a Roman theatre built for 7,000 spectators between 5 and 1 BC, an excavated forum quarter on the Molinete hill with a sanctuary of Isis, a curia and the harbour baths, and a castle hill that has carried a Roman temple to Aesculapius, an Islamic alcazaba, a medieval fortress and the siren that warned the city of air raids. Between them runs a centre full of early 20th-century Art Nouveau, much of it by the architect Víctor Beltrí.

Two days covers it comfortably. One morning for the theatre museum and the Molinete forum park, an afternoon for the castle and the harbour front, and a second day for the free military and modern-art museums plus a beach. If you only have half a day, do the theatre museum and nothing else.

History

The city was founded around 227 BC by the Carthaginian general Hasdrubal, who called it Qart Hadasht, New City. The choice was the harbour: a deep natural inlet ringed by hills, the best anchorage on this stretch of coast. Scipio Africanus took it for Rome in 209 BC and renamed it Carthago Nova.

Under Rome the place got rich on silver. Ancient sources put the yield of the local mines at 25,000 drachmae a day, and the city was rebuilt on that money. The theatre is the surviving proof. Dedications to Lucius Caesar on the eastern entrance and probably to Gaius Caesar on the western one, together with an inscription found in the pit under the stage, date the building to between 5 and 1 BC.

Decline came fast. The Vandals sacked the city in 435, after which it served for a while as capital of the Byzantine province of Spania, and under Islamic rule it was Qartayannat al-Halfa, Cartagena of the esparto grass. Castile took it in 1245 under the future Alfonso X, after the town rejected the terms it had been offered. For five centuries after that it was a modest harbour town, and the Roman quarter above the port became one of the poorest districts of the walled city.

The turn came in 1728, when Cartagena was made capital of the Spanish Navy’s Maritime Department of the Mediterranean. Fortifications went up around the bay, the Arsenal was built, and the town acquired the military layout it still has. Mining and industry in the 19th century paid for the second layer, the Art Nouveau facades of the centre. Politics kept pace: in 1873 the city declared itself an independent canton and held out against government forces, and in the Civil War it was the last major city in Spain to surrender to Franco, in 1939.

The theatre had hidden in plain sight because this was one of the few parts of the city occupied without a break since antiquity, and because the old cathedral of Santa María la Vieja had been built partly over the top of the seating. Recovery took twenty years. A funding agreement between the city, the regional government and the Fundación Cajamurcia was signed in July 1996, the theatre was declared a Bien de Interés Cultural in January 1999, and Rafael Moneo presented his museum design in July 2002. The museum and the restored monument opened together on 11 July 2008.

Visiting

Start at the Plaza del Ayuntamiento. The triangular Palacio Consistorial holds the tourist information office, open Monday to Saturday 10:00 to 13:30 and 16:30 to 18:30, Sundays and holidays 10:30 to 13:30. Puerto de Culturas has its own desk and head office at Calle Gisbert 10, phone 968 500 093.

The Roman theatre museum

The entrance faces the Palacio Consistorial, at Plaza del Ayuntamiento 9. Moneo’s design is two buildings joined by an underground corridor, so the route runs from the ticket hall through the Palacio Pascual de Riquelme, then into a tunnel beneath the church of Santa María la Vieja where you pass the church’s own foundations from the 13th to the 19th centuries, a stretch of the Islamic medina wall and the remains of the Roman house that stood here first. You come out on a walkway between the lower and middle tiers of seating, with the whole theatre in front of you, and leave through the western side entrance onto the Plaza de la Condesa Peralta.

Entry is 7 euros, or 6 reduced. From 1 May to 30 September and during Holy Week it opens Tuesday to Saturday 10:00 to 20:00 and Sunday 10:00 to 14:00; from 1 October to 30 April it closes at 18:00 Tuesday to Saturday, with the same Sunday morning. Mondays closed. Allow ninety minutes.

The forum quarter and the small Roman sites

The Museo Foro Romano Molinete, also 7 euros, opens onto one of the largest urban archaeological parks in Spain: the curia with its marble floor, the terraced colonial forum, a sanctuary of Isis, streets with cart ruts still in them, the harbour baths and the Atrium Building with its painted walls. Two smaller sites, the Augusteum and the Casa de la Fortuna, cost 4 euros each and only open 10:00 to 15:00, so they have to be fitted into a morning.

The castle hill

The Castillo de la Concepción is the orientation stop: a run through three thousand years of the city from the Punic foundation to the 19th-century industrial boom, and the best view over the harbour. The panoramic lift up the hill costs 2 euros on its own; the castle alone is 5, and the two together are 6. Both run 10:00 to 20:00 from 1 July to 15 September, 10:00 to 19:00 Tuesday to Sunday from mid-March to the end of June and again from mid-September to 1 November, and 10:00 to 17:30 Tuesday to Sunday the rest of the year.

The amphitheatre

Not a normal visit yet. While excavation continues, Puerto de Culturas runs free guided tours of the dig on Saturdays and Sundays in June at 10:30, leaving from the panoramic lift, thirty places, about an hour and a half, and not suitable for anyone with reduced mobility. Information on 968 500 093.

Museums that cost nothing

The Museo Naval on the Paseo de Alfonso XII opens Tuesday to Friday 09:00 to 14:00 and Saturday 10:00 to 14:00, closed Sundays and Mondays, with a different August pattern of Monday to Friday mornings only. The Museo Histórico Militar on Plaza General López Pinto opens Monday to Saturday 10:00 to 13:30. MURAM, the regional modern art museum on Plaza de la Merced, opens Tuesday to Saturday 11:00 to 14:00 and 17:00 to 20:00, Sundays and holidays mornings only, closed Mondays. All three are free.

Sea

Cala Cortina is the town beach, well equipped and with a promenade, and it fills up. El Portús, a semi-urban beach 11 km out, is the easiest escape from it. For sand without buildings, drive east to Calblanque, a protected beach inside the regional park of the same name; the Las Cobaticas information point opens 09:00 to 14:00 and 15:00 to 17:30 from October to May and 08:30 to 15:30 from June to September, Tuesday to Sunday.

Tips

• Tuesdays are free at several Puerto de Culturas sites, including the Roman theatre museum, the castle and the Molinete forum, for the last two opening hours of the day. You have to turn up in person; the discount does not apply to online purchases and there are no refunds on a ticket bought earlier the same day.
• The Fuerte de Navidad does the same thing on Sundays rather than Tuesdays, again for the final two hours.
• Passes only pay off from four sites up: 16 euros for four museums, 20 for five, 32 for the lot, with reduced rates of 14, 17.50 and 28. The theatre museum counts as two of your choices, the castle throws in the panoramic lift, and every pass expires fifteen days after purchase.
• Reduced rates cover under-12s, students up to 25, unemployed people, pensioners, disabled visitors, large-family card holders, families of two adults with two children, and groups from 20 people. You must buy at the ticket desk with valid documentation, not online. Under-3s go free everywhere.
• Last admission is fifteen minutes before closing at most sites, thirty at the Molinete forum and the castle. Arriving at ten to seven for a seven o’clock close gets you turned away.
• Mondays are the dead day. The theatre museum closes on Mondays all year, and outside high season, which runs 1 July to 15 September, so does the rest of the Puerto de Culturas network. The Museo Naval and MURAM shut on Mondays too; the Museo Histórico Militar is the one that opens.

• Everything closes on 1 and 6 January and 25 December, and afternoons only on 5 January and 24 and 31 December. The local Viernes de Dolores holiday is free entry at the municipal sites.
• Two festivals take the city over for ten days each and both are worth planning around, in either direction. Holy Week, with five brotherhoods and a reputation for the order of its processions, has been a Fiesta of International Tourist Interest since 2005; Carthagineses y Romanos, ten days in September of parades and re-enactments of the Second Punic War staged by more than fifty groups, got the same status in 2017.
• The tourist office in the Palacio Consistorial closes for three hours in the middle of the day, so pick up maps and check current hours before 13:30 or after 16:30.
• Buy tickets online at puertodeculturas.cartagena.es if you are coming in high season, but remember that the fifteen-day clock on a pass starts when you collect the tickets at a museum, not when you pay.