It is located in the southwest of the Iberian Peninsula off the Atlantic Ocean separated from neighbouring San Fernando by a narrow isthmus. The city is dotted with parks where exotic plants flourish, including giant trees supposedly brought to the Iberian Peninsula from the New World. The Carthaginians continued to use this name and all subsequent names have derived from it.
One resolution for this discrepancy has been to assume that Gadir was merely a small seasonal trading post in its earliest days. Ancient Gadir occupied two small islandsβprimarily a settlement, and Kotinoussa, hosting cemeteries and sanctuaries outside the urban areaβsituated near the mouth of River Guadalete.
By the 6th century BC, disturbances within Phoenicia itself, notably the fall of Tyre to the Babylonians BC , led to the end of Phoenician control over southern Iberia. This vacuum was later filled by ancient Carthage , which rose as a predominant power in the region during subsequent eras. The Phoenician settlement traded with Tartessos , a city-state whose exact location remains unknown but is thought to have been somewhere near the mouth of the Guadalquivir River.
One of the city's notable features during antiquity was the temple on the south end of its island dedicated to the Phoenician god Melqart , who was conflated with Hercules by the Greeks and Romans under the names "Tyrian Hercules" and "Hercules Gaditanus".
It had an oracle and was famed for its wealth. A tumulus near Gadeira was associated with Geryon's final resting-place. Some historians, based in part on this source, believe that the columns of this temple were the origin of the myth of the " pillars of Hercules ".
