G A D E S.

TODAY the Spaniards call this island Cadiz, and corruptly Caliz. Our countrymen, I do not know by what reasoning, nickname it Calis in the masculine. In the smaller Julia Gaditana Augusta, which previously, as it seems from Strabo, was called Neapolis New City. Today they call this Cadiz, just as they do the island. This is an episcopal city today, whose Prelate also usurps the title of Algeciras.

That this island was sailed to and cultivated from the beginning by the Tyrian Phoenicians is evident from the written monuments of the ancients. It is thought by some that Geryones lived here afterwards, whose herds Hercules the Egyptian or Tyrian carried off. On one of its horns was the temple of this Hercules, illustrious for its founders, religion, wealth, and antiquity. Why it is sacred, Mela says, the bones of him situated there make it so. Strabo is the authority that there was a temple of Saturn on the other. In this temple of Hercules, Caesar beheld the image of Alexander the Great, as Suetonius reports in his life. There was also a fountain there, suitable for drinking, which, with an opposite effect of the tide, would fail during the overflow of the sea and be filled when it flowed back. The same author hands down that there were bronze columns of eight cubits in the same temple, upon which the cost incurred in the construction of the temple was inscribed. The same author also recognizes a shrine of Juno there, from Artemidorus. Dionysius describes a temple of Old Age, and likewise of Death, on it, and the same author notes altars to the Year, to the Month, to Art, and to Poverty. Isidorus hands down that the pillars of Hercules were shown on it, and that a tree grows on it similar to a palm, whose gum, when infecting glass, renders a Ceraunian thunderstone/obsidian-like gem.

The inhabitants were once famous for their skill in navigation, and they do not at all degenerate in this present age from this ancestral method of surveying the seas. Their primary income, however, consists of the production of salt and the fishing of tuna, for their capture is a solemn event here. Having dissected them into pieces, cured them with salt, and stored them in casks, they distribute them for sale throughout almost all of Europe.

Antiquity believed this island to be the end of the known world toward the West; that the Sun, weary from his daily labor, submerged himself into the Ocean here and rested, whence "the beds of the Sun at Gades" in Statius. Even today, our sailors call the promontory of this island toward the West (which is called by the inhabitants Saint Sebastian) Het eynde der Werelt The end of the world, as if you were to say, the final boundary of the world.