El Puerto de Santa María has been part of the Council of Europe's Cultural Route The Phoenicians' Route since May 2024. The objectives of this project include developing knowledge and promoting the sustainable conservation of geographical and historical sites related to Phoenician, Punic or Iberian history, throughout the Mediterranean setting. 

One of the oldest and most important sites documented to date of this mythical culture that came from the East is located in our municipal area. We are referring, naturally, to the Archaeological Site `Castillo de Doña Blanca´, also known by some classical sources as Puerto de Menesteo. Due to its architectural importance, it is also recognised as the largest preserved urban settlement of the Phoenician emporium in the Bay of Cadiz, Gadir, built at the foot of the Sierra de San Cristóbal and around a privileged natural estuary where the sea entered approximately three thousand years ago.

In any case, it is the best preserved Phoenician city in all of Southwestern Europe and probably the first settlement of our population before Roman times, when the city was moved to its current location under the name of Portus Gaditanus, after the works that the Balbo family undertook at the mouth of the Guadalete River.

As part of `The Phoenicians’ Route´, El Puerto de Santa María claims its crucial role in the geographical context of the area during the Ancient World, contributing its important historical heritage to serve research and turn the city into a reference and destination for Cultural Tourism. A model of tourism that helps break down seasonalization, and interested in the entire three-thousand-year-old legacy of the environment, where other important Phoenician remains are preserved such as those found in Cádiz capital, in San Fernando or in Chiclana de la Frontera, making up the whole of Gadir as a single entity spread over several enclaves of the ancient Bay of Cádiz –named `The Trilogy of Gadir´  by scholars-.

In fact, The Phoenicians' Route was created to highlight the connection between the great nautical routes of Antiquity that, from the 12th century BC, were used by the Phoenician people as an essential part of commercial and cultural exchange in the Mediterranean. Through these routes - which were later used for the same purpose by Greeks, Romans, Etruscans, Iberians, Tartessians and Muslims - the Phoenicians, great sailors and merchants, founded, colonised and extended their culture, our alphabet, the cultivation of vines and winemaking, and a religious syncretism that spread through their network of colonies, cities or settlements that reached this part of the Atlantic, where `The Ports of Gadir´ were built.

Today, these sites make up a unique heritage throughout the ancient estuary of the current Bay of Cadiz; a meeting place destined to become today one of the most extraordinary resources for research and the promotion of cultural tourism in the area, not only at a local, provincial or regional level, but throughout southern Europe and the Mediterranean basin.