The laid-back Spanish beach town of Cádiz, Spain is world famous for its watch towers, many of which were built during its heyday of trade-based prosperity in the 1700s. We spent our first day trekking around the Old Town in search of the official watch tower and highest point in Cádiz, the Torre Tavira. Fluent Spanglish came back into our minds (now punctuated with the listhpy “s”es of Spain instead of the pronunciation we’re used to in Latin America) as we navigated up and down the gorgeous narrow streets and alleyways occasionally stopping to ask for directions. “Torre Tavira a la izquierda? No? Ah, ok, a la derecha. SÃ. Muchas gracias.” Torre Tavira now houses a camara oscura which uses a system of lenses, mirrors, gears and pulleys to project a real-time image of the surrounding city onto a large white disc. Our very entertaining guide provided multi-lingual commentary on the sights of the city, moving levers to swing the camera in different directions and zoom in and out while moving the white disc itself up and down to focus the projected image. We couldn’t help but spend the rest of our visit walking around town wondering if at any given moment the camara might be focused in on us.
