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Interest in this strange little place is essentially its novelty. This enormous hunk of limestone, 5km long, 2 wide and 450km high has fascinated people of the Mediterranean basin since Neanderthal times, confirmed by the finds of skulls and artefacts in a number of the rock's many caves.
The last time I went to the rock it was a bit nasty to be honest, full of sailors, drunkenness and sad grey buildings. Ten years later the sailors have all but gone and the local Government has spent a fortune on improving the environment. Clearly there is very little point in me giving directions to sites as everything is just a few yards away. Even the airport runway doubles up as the road to Spain!
Let us start with the rock itself. Gibraltar was for hundreds of years a vital sea base for the Brits as their war ships continued to claim distant shores for the empire. As the rock is so small the logical move was to tunnel into it for protection. As a result there are now some thirty five miles of tunnels all well preserved and some equipped as they used to be. Like the Upper Galleries blasted out of the rock during the Great Siege of 1779-82 in order to find a spot where they could point guns down onto the Spanish below.
The top of the rock is covered with four things:
1. Apes: The story goes that the British will keep the rock only so long as the Barbary apes remain too; Winston Churchill was suspicious enough to augment their numbers during World War II when they started to decline. (Apes have no tail, Monkeys do).
2. Taxi drivers: They are definitely not an endangered species. A plentiful supply of them queue up to show the tourists to the apes. Each driver has a plentiful supply of goodies for his or her favourite Barbary, so the chances of them ever leaving the rock are remote to say the least.
3. Caves: Apart from the man made caves and tunnels there are also some that occur naturally, the finest being St Michael's cave just a short walk along Queen's road from the apes den. This is an immense natural cavern which led ancient people to believe that the rock was hollow. It is used occasionally as an underground theatre although I would take an umbrella if you are thinking of watching anything of length, the roof drips! It was around here in 1848 that an English officer found a female skull. He thought that it might be "quite old" and put it in his desk drawer where he promptly forgot about it. Later that same year someone in Germany digging in the Neander Valley found a skull from the same period and the German find gave its name to the Neanderthal period. Had the officer been quicker we would all refer to that period as the Gibralterian period!
4. Batteries: Nothing to do with volts but the warren of gun emplacements that litter the top of the rock. O'Hara's Battery is typical of this triumph of engineering over geographical impossibility with an enormous gun sitting on a concrete silo that still contains its decaying working parts. The gun, a spare which is just round the corner, its guts and, for that matter, the concrete was all pulled up the rock by hand. Hence the frequent iron rings in the rock by the side of the roads.
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