Gibraltar, Gibraltar

We got into Gibraltar well before dawn, too early to start tourist-ing. Which didn’t stop me from walking along the ship’s promenade and gazing soulfully out at The Rock.

Before I got here, almost everything I knew about Gibraltar I learned from James Bond. (My apologies to everyone who ever tried to teach me history / geography / social studies.) One of the things James Bond failed to mention was the proximity of Gibraltar to Africa…

… that misty land mass in the distance on the left. Is. Freaking. Africa. Hello, Morocco.

I did the bus tour and saw all the sights pretty quickly – Europa Point, the lighthouse, the American Embassy. The entire Territory is only 2.6 square miles, after all, and home to 32,000 Gibraltarians.

Gibraltar has been a military base forever, and the evidence of occupation is everywhere. Even the waterfall is man-made, the discharge of reclaimed water from the occupants of The Rock. The castle is a remnant of Moorish occupation, and the cannon is English.

And you can’t come to Gibraltar without taking a trip through the Nature Reserve to see the Barbary Apes.

We were warned repeatedly that the apes could be aggressive and not to have anything loose or dangling just hanging out there; but when we went through they had just been fed and weren’t interested in tormenting tourists.

Part of my tour was a brief walk through the tunnels dug during WWII. Gibraltar is still an active naval base for Britian and the Americans, so we were limited to touring approximately 500 meters of tunnel (there is a little over 50 km of tunnel all told). Inside the tunnels it is dark, damp, and very tight quarters.

When in use, there would have been domed tents, like at the far end, lining the entire hallway.

Barracks slept 600 men at a time. The schedule was 8 hours of sleep, 8 hours of sentry duty, and 8 hours of pushing rock. There were no assigned quarters, when it was your turn to sleep you slept in whatever bed was open.

This is the intersection in the tunnels just behind “Jock’s Balcony”, a lookout that allowed the commanders to view almost the entire battlefield in front of them. From this intersection, you could take a different tunnel to get to town, to the airport, to the artillery, or back to the barracks. The Clapham Junction part is an inside joke, as Clapham Junction in England is one of the busiest railway stations on the line, and all trains eventually pass through it.

We only had a short stop-over, about 5 hours in port, and all good things must come to an end…

Farewell… ❤️

Next Up: Cartagena…

A quick note on the comments – thank you to everyone who has commented, I am seeing them even if you aren’t. I’m glad you are enjoying this journey with me, and look forward to sharing more stories with all of you when I get home.