The promoters
Cayetano del Toro, Segismundo Moret, Claudio López Bru and Amadeo Rodríguez sustained the project with political influence, shipping capital and local labour.
National Maritime Exhibition
1887
“Cádiz, a city that lives off the sea, invites the whole sea to visit it.”
15 August — 15 November
Audiovisual reconstruction of 1887 partially generated or manipulated using AI. This is not archival footage.
Chapter one
A city that defends itself by building
The crisis of the 1880s hit the Bay hard. The answer came not from a ministry but from Cádiz's own civil society: merchants, shipowners, doctors and local politicians set out to prove, through an exhibition open to the world, that Cádiz was still a place where warships could be built and repaired.
Forty thousand square metres were reclaimed from the sea. Seven radial pavilions in Neo-Mudéjar style went up, their ends shaped like ships' prows, along with a hundred-metre hall and two machinery halls. And at night, the exhibition lit up with electric light.
60.000Visitors
180.000m²Surface area
33Warships
7Radial pavilions
The floating section
Thirty-three warships from six countries anchored off the site, with more than ten thousand sailors ashore over the three months of the event.
The electric light
A London installation firm lit the grounds at night. The exhibition became an urban spectacle as well as an industrial one.
The legacy
The reclaimed land and the infrastructure built remained available for the shipbuilding industry that arrived a few years later.
One hundred and forty years later
The same bay, the same industry and the same intent: to show the world what is made here.
Back to CIME 2027Sources
García Díaz, M. (2015), The National Maritime Exhibition of Cádiz of 1887, Revista Hispanoamericana, no. 5 · Provincial Council of Cádiz (1887), General Regulations of the National Maritime Exhibition · Joly, D. (2012), 125 years of the maritime exhibition, Diario de Cádiz.