Grove Koger
My first wife and I visited Gibraltar in early 1973 after traveling through Spain from Barcelona by train and bus, but the next leg of our trip was a little complicated. Even after consulting the stamps on my old passport, I had to think for a while in order to reconstruct the events.
At the time, Spain and the United Kingdom were having one of their periodic tiffs. Under the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht, which concluded the War of the Spanish Succession, Gibraltar has been British since 1713, but that fact hasn’t prevented friction. After all, Gibraltar is a tiny peninsula dangling from the coast of Spain, and the Spanish feel, not unreasonably, that it ought to be their peninsula.
Only six years before our visit, however, more than 99 percent of Gibraltarians had voted in favor of retaining British sovereignty, which led to the passage of a Constitution Order in the U.K. affirming the status. These moves, in turn, so incensed Spanish dictator Francisco Franco that he cut off communications between Spain and the territory and closed the border. That border was, and is, only about three-fourths of a mile long, but we couldn’t cross it, and that was that.
Our solution was to sail from the nearby Spanish port of Algeciras, where we’d been staying and which lies within perfectly plain view of the British outpost, to Tangier. That entailed a ferry ride of an hour or so across the Strait of Gibraltar to the famous Moroccan port, from which, after lunch with mint tea (naturally), we boarded another ferry to Gibraltar, which we were then able to enter freely. We were given permission to remain in Gib (as the locals call it) for three days. After dreary Algeciras, where it had rained every day, Gibraltar was a welcome change, and after those three days we obtained permission to remain another three days, having shown the authorities our stack of travelers checks to prove that we weren’t destitute.
My most vivid memory from Gibraltar involves the grand view we enjoyed the morning after our arrival. From a vantage point halfway up the steep face of the “Rock,” we were able to gaze back across the Strait to the African coast as tiny ships crept through the busy sea lane far, far below. The hassle had been worth it.
Besides being fascinating in its own purely geographical right, Gibraltar has a long and complicated history. Years after my visit, I rewrote a short story by Prosper Mérimée (who died September 23, 1870) as a piece of alternative history about a balloon attack during what’s known as the Great Siege of Gibraltar (1779-1783). If you’d like to read “The Storming of the Rock,” visit the fine Catalan-American review Punt Volat at https://puntvolatlit.com/the-storming-of-the-rock/.
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The image at the top of today’s post is a photograph of Gibraltar taken from Algeciras by chengtzf (pixabay.com) and is reproduced courtesy of Needpix.com. The map showing the relative positions of Algeciras, Tangier and Gibraltar is a NASA World Wind image annotated by Prioryman, and is reproduced courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. The third image is a scan of the key pages from my passport.
World Enough 