Before the Romans arrived with their roads and their legions, the western Mediterranean was already a connected world. Phoenician traders from the Levantine coast had been sailing these waters since at least the ninth century BCE, establishing trading posts and small colonies from what is now Tunisia to the Atlantic coast of Portugal. The ports they founded still exist — sometimes under different names, sometimes barely changed at all.
Cádiz — Gadir to the Phoenicians — is perhaps the most striking example. Founded, according to ancient tradition, around 1100 BCE, it claims to be the oldest continuously inhabited city in western Europe. The claim is contested, as such claims always are, but there is something undeniable about standing on the tip of that Atlantic peninsula and feeling the weight of the centuries. The Phoenicians chose the location for the same reasons that made it valuable to every subsequent occupier: a natural harbour, a defensible position, proximity to the Atlantic fishing grounds.
Further east, the Phoenician presence is less visible but still traceable. Málaga — Malaka — was a significant trading post, particularly for the salted fish that the Phoenicians exported across the Mediterranean. The garum factories that the Romans later made famous along this coast were built on Phoenician foundations, both literally and figuratively.
What strikes me, travelling these routes, is how much the geography still determines things. The same natural harbours that the Phoenicians chose are still the major ports. The same mountain passes that funnelled trade inland are still the routes that roads and railways follow. The landscape has a memory that outlasts the civilisations that moved through it.
The Phoenicians left no great monuments. They were traders, not empire-builders, and their legacy is mostly invisible — absorbed into the cultures that came after them. But if you know what to look for, the ghosts are everywhere.