It is midnight on a Monday in Cádiz, and I am standing among hundreds in a plaza overlooking la Caleta beach as fireworks fan out over the Atlantic. Tonight is the Fiesta de San Juan. Soon, a 15ft gnome looming over us will be burnt to the ground. I’m feeling explicitly at home, and can’t stop grinning.

I have been in this magical little city about a week, and it seems I have sprouted roots.

Wandering through Spain for a month with no plan and a big appetite, I’d achieved a pleasant momentum that made the process of moving from one dizzying place to the next fairly painless. I barely worried about what I was leaving behind: in Madrid, the café in Lavapies strewn with books and squat furniture that a friend immediately pronounced my office, ‘my desk’ looking out onto a fountain casually interrupting the street; in Ronda, a plaza at the edge of the walled city where two old men on a bench muse about the king’s abdication; in Sevilla, an abandoned building transformed into a community space, where one Sunday night I found myself at a circus-cabaret.

But Cádiz altered my rhythm, slowed me down, put its hooks in me. Much of this has to do with Casa Caracol, a hostel-haven I found quite by accident, and the people I met here. I arrived with a last-minute reservation for a single night, sweaty and hassled, having barely made it to the train from Sevilla. The door opened to the friendliest face, I put my backpack down, and instantly fell into place.

A chunk of time has come loose; I live here now. I sleep in a hammock on the terrace; I drink my coffee standing in the street; I go to the mercado and haggle over the price of cherries with a frutero trying to flirt soft-willed shoppers into bigger purchases; I bike around town through clusters of American tourists and loitering locals, chirping ‘ perdón ’; I eat all the tomatoes; I wash and hang up clothes; nearly every day I swim in the ocean and watch the sunset.

How long have I been doing this? A few days? That can’t be. It’s been forever, yet I can’t seem to leave. The group of naturalised gaditanos (residents of Cádiz) who run the hostel turn it into a community. I infiltrate it; it absorbs me. Each morning I think I should plan my departure and each morning one of them looks at my face and tells me it’s clear I’m not going anywhere. Many among them have the same story: they came for two days (from Galicia, Madrid, Argentina, Alabama) and stayed.

Cádiz has a spell, a pull, a glue. I don’t know what it is; but it is palpable. Perhaps, it is a quality of quiet permanence, accrued over centuries; a grandmotherliness — warm and full of stories.

History is everywhere: in the Museo de Cádiz, two perfectly-preserved Phoenician sarcophagi thought to be from the 5th century BC; at the south end of the island, the ruins of a temple to Melkart whose columns the Greeks and Romans took to be the mythic pillars of Hercules, signalling to seafarers the edge of the known world; all over town, the architecture of Al-Andalus, the golden dome giving the cathedral the air of a mini Hagia Sophia; the plaque-covered exterior of the Oratorio de San Felipe Neri, where the first of Spain’s seven constitutions was drafted in 1812 as Cádiz held out against Napoleonic rule.

Every innocuous detail holds something in it, decoded for me by another Cádiz-adoptee on a walking tour of the city: the wrought-iron loops on the sides of buildings, now perfect bike stands, were once used to tether horses; balcony grilles were given their shape to accommodate the belled skirts of noble ladies; the Plaza de Cruz Verde named after a cross that once stood there during the inquisition and where citizens revealed to be privately Muslim were publicly burned.

The entire city is intricately inscribed with its own story; it is more of itself than anywhere I’ve been. It has been an outpost, a fort, a port, a cosmopolis, a refuge, and now has the personality of a small town. It is so much, and so intimate. This is what floors me: walking down a side street that was once an inlet, bougainvillea creeping up a wall that is centuries old, watching the sun set over la Caleta while eating the world’s best peach, imagining myself at the edge of the known world.

On the night of San Juan, after the effigy has gone up in smoke, la Caleta is full of people singing, drinking, skipping waves that roll in, jumping back and forth over bonfires. The thing to do, I am told, is to write on a piece of paper something you want to leave in the past, or a wish for the future, and burn it.

I cannot make a sturdy argument for why burning a piece of paper with the word ‘fear’ on it has anything more than a flimsy significance. It is perhaps easy to find fear remote and irrelevant on holiday in a country full of beautiful people and fruit, in a city where one can walk home at four in the morning, having to dodge only the spray of street-cleaners.

But standing where I am, I feel steady. History and geography are in sharp focus, and I can locate myself within them. I feel at home, and emboldened by belonging. The sheer drama of the occasion, I figure, is worth harvesting.

And so, grinning like a fool, I write miedo at the back of a receipt and, shielding it from the wind, burn it to ash.

Get there

Cádiz is easily accessible by bus or train from nearly every Andalusian city. The closest airport is at Jerez de la Frontera (40km), but Sevilla (120km) is much more interesting. Buses from Jerez (€3) and Sevilla (€13) run almost every hour. It is best to check timings and buy tickets at the bus station, but if you must do it online, try movelia.es. Or take a train ( > renfe.com ). Cádiz itself is best seen on foot or by bicycle.

Stay

I recommend Casa Caracol, a warm, welcoming four-storey hostel in the old town, a five-minute walk from the train and bus station. Caracol has bunk beds in dorm rooms, private double rooms and even apartments nearby ( > hostelcasacaracol.com ).

Eat

Eat at the stalls in the Mercado Central in the Barrio de San Juan or at any bar full of old men. For something nicer (and more expensive), wander the Barrio de la Viña and find a restaurant that suits your mood.

Tip

At Casa Caracol ask about the hammocks and sleep under the stars for €10 a night.

( Devika Bakshi is a Delhi-based writer )

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