We walked off the ship into layers of history so thick you can almost touch them. This harbor has welcomed vessels for more than two millennia – first as Mastia, then refounded in 227 BC by the Carthaginian general Hasdrubal the Fair, who renamed it Qart Hadasht, meaning "New City." The Carthaginians held this jewel for barely twenty years before Rome's Scipio Africanus conquered it in 209 BC and christened it Carthago Nova – New Carthage. Under Roman rule, the city reached its zenith as the proud capital of the province of Carthaginensis, a Mediterranean crossroads where silver, fish sauce, and esparto grass flowed through these same quays.

The Roman theater appeared suddenly between modern buildings like a portal through time – 7,000 souls once gathered here in the late first century BC to watch tragedies and comedies under Mediterranean sun. It lay buried and forgotten until 1988, when construction workers unearthed it mere blocks from the waterfront. The theater museum, designed by Rafael Moneo and opened on July 11, 2008, guides you through a tunnel of shadows before releasing you onto the ancient stage itself. I stood there looking up at tiered marble seats carved into the hillside, and the centuries collapsed – goosebumps on a warm Spanish morning.

Just minutes away stands the Punic Wall – fortifications from that same founding year of 227 BC, discovered in 1989 and still defiant after 2,252 years. To walk from Carthaginian stones to Roman grandeur to Art Nouveau splendor on Calle Mayor takes ten minutes and spans twenty-three centuries. The modernist Casas seem to bloom from the cobblestones like architectural flowers, their curlicues and ironwork dancing in conversation with Byzantine arches and medieval towers.

We had lunch at Techato – arroz caldero that tasted like the Mediterranean distilled into saffron and sea, eaten on a sun-warmed terrace overlooking the harbor where Hasdrubal's triremes once anchored. In the afternoon we took a taxi to Cala Cortina beach – fifteen minutes through hills where Roman legions once marched. Clear water, umbrella pines casting shade on pale sand, almost no one there. The pros: compact, beautiful, and genuinely surprising. The cons: still relatively unknown, which is also why it remains perfect.