The first full day started with a powerfully protein-heavy breakfast at a joint called the Pancake Factory, which does big hearty meals, big hearty piles of pancakes, and proper coffee for really not much money. We needed the fuel, because from the town the only way was up. Striking out east, we ascended a long, winding staircase, littered with cats and with the odd mural adding a splash of interest to the pastel-painted buildings: Andalucian peasants, a two-storey octopus. For a peninsula bounded on three sides by water, it’s honestly astonishingly hard to actually see the sea from anywhere in built-up Gibraltar, even a long way above sea level. Eventually, we reached the Moorish Castle, or the Tower of Homage (I’m still not sure why it’s called that).
All the attractions on the upper Rock have a shared ticket, with a festival-esque wristband bearing a QR code you scan in at turnstiles. The usual covid facemask’n’Purell measures already feel like they’ve been there forever. On the outside, the Tower of Homage is a formidable-looking block, heavily pock-marked by both catapults and cannon. On the inside it’s a surprisingly elegant building as castle keeps go, built in a Romanesque style of thin red bricks separated by thick bands of mortar, and highly sophisticated cement vaulting well ahead of anything in northern Europe at the time (the Rock itself would of course have provided lime for unlimited cement). Those lovely Moorish eight-pointed stars made a showing in the ventilation cutouts above a bath area, and at the centre of decorative plasterwork ribs on the domed ceiling of a tiny interior chapel. The present, strikingly bare, state of the walls and brickwork is both recent and deliberate; it’s all basically undoing a 1970s “restoration” involving slapping concrete and quarry tiles everywhere then adding “Moorish stuff”, which from pictures in the museum made it all look like a budget shisha bar.
From the top of the keep, still in its 1970s form with lots of spiky, historically-off but quite stylish merlons (the restoration probably ran out of money a storey down), you can see clearly the line of the old Moorish walls running down on two parts to protect the oldest part of town, and a sign of how much the town has ballooned out (with WW2-era searchlight positions to watch La Linea perched on some of the ancient towers). From it and the garden below, you can also clearly see the airport, and we watched an easyJet come in from near the position’s mandatory 24-pounder, and sat a peaceful few minutes watching the frogs and terrapins in the pond before moving on up. A delicious cool musty breeze came from the mouth of the WW2 tunnels, but the next tour wasn’t for over an hour, so we pushed on up the slope, past our first Barbary macaque (fluffy, aloof), concrete rainwater cisterns and a section of the fantastically fate-tempting “Unclimbable Fence”, complete with mocking info board. The next exhibition, Willis’s Magazines, built around a couple of gorgeously built powder magazines (with very solid looking walls and, in a way which dates it, very solid roofs**), presented the story of the Great Siege with info boards and a selection of quite well-made mannequins having various types of bad time.
Up another zigzag was a closed Military Heritage Centre, some mucked-about-with old gun emplacements with a set of flags, and a plaque commemorating a visit in 1954 by Brenda and Philip (yawn!); but down a neglected looking side passage we found a marvellous battery of four 5.25” dual-purpose*** guns in boxy turrets that look like they’d been yanked directly off the deck of a destroyer (and may have been). Watching the booted eagles twirling above the cemeteries of the shady northeastern quarter (Christian graves divided from Jewish by a white wall, men from women within the Jewish cemetery by a green path) we got our first taste of the easterly wind blowing out of the Med towards the Atlantic; elbows against the railing, we could feel it singing.
At the entrance designated “WW2 Tunnels” you scan your wristband, are issued a helmet and an audioguide, and follow the polite young Spanish chap into miles upon miles of dark, damp, musty WW2 excavation. The objects left behind (a terribly rusty 25-pounder gun-howitzer, a filthy old Lee-Enfield rifle, a panoply of 1940s rock-drilling equipment) aren’t that impressive, but the photographs, maps and general historical storytelling are excellent – the tragic tale of the 13,000 Gibraltarians evacuated to Casablanca only to be kicked out by the vengeful French after Mers-el-Kibir being one standout, the unbelievable Operation Tracer another, and photos of Gibraltar celebrating Italy’s surrender by lighting off every searchlight and gun on the entire Rock simultaneously a third.
But the real stars are the tunnels, coupled with the knowledge that they are just the tiniest fraction of the unbelievable amount of subterranean fortification on this level alone, with more layers above and below. The fortress was designed to hold sixteen thousand men, with food and ammunition to fight a major siege. A whole underground city was built: huge galleries hacked and blasted from the limestone, Nissen huts installed inside them to reduce the effects of the upsetting caveyness (and moisture) on the troops, vast underground reservoirs built for rainwater. The audioguides made a weird cacophany off the wet limestone walls. Each segment has a British place name: Fosse Way, Maida Vale, Peterborough Chambers – pleasingly, the biggest confluence of different tunnels was called Clapham Junction. At “Jock’s Balcony”, one of the hundreds of positions for observing (or shooting at) anyone trying to cross the isthmus from Spain, we staggered out into the blinding sunlight and tried not to imagine what it would like to cross all that under fire from modern weapons.
Back up the hill we encountered an entrance to the Grand Siege Tunnels, a set of 18th century fortifications beefed up by several subsequent garrisons but all working on the basic principle of a tunnel through the Rock with a bunch of gun emplacements poking out the side. The Gibraltar heritage community clearly has both a lot of love and sufficient money in it, and told a thorough, compelling story of the Great Siege, the downwards-firing gun carriages developed for the unusual use case of firing a cannon straight down a cliff face, and the subsequent higher-budget Victorian takes on the same. At the end of the older stuff is the “Notch”, a fantastic rock promontory which creates a natural bastion firing in all directions; a later set of WW2 tunnels cut down sharper and steeper, creating further gun positions through less well-made tunnels, including one which cuts straight through the Rock to an exceptionally weatherbeaten mortar crew of mannequins peeling in the endless easterly wind.
It was already 16:30 and we had barely left the northernmost edge of the Rock, so rather than burn ourselves out we worked out the quickest and gentlest descent back to town. This being Gibraltar, even that path took us through three different heavy weapons positions: the Tovey Battery, an empty pair of open 6″ positions; the Genoa Battery, an ancient Spanish position overlaid with WW2 concrete and searchlights; and last but best, the Devil’s Gap Battery, an Edwardian fortification with a handsome pair of 6″ guns and an unusually well-preserved set of shell hoists and gear in the battery underneath them. Dodging the occasional car of Gibraltar’s high-level one-way-system, passing a cactus garden on one side, we descended into town, and found a marvellous tapas place called Hacienda Patagónica for some really rather good meat, cheese and wine. A strong first day of Rock-climbing, we felt.
* With apologies to Julian Barnes. Sort of.
** Modern structures designed to contain stuff that goes bang are designed to allow a potential bang to be able to escape in a harmless direction. This is typically achieved with very solid walls and a very light roof. Trying to contain a bang generally creates a bigger bang – more of a problem for modern high explosive than gunpowder.
*** Which is to say, for shooting at both air and surface targets. The purpose is, ultimately, to kill people.
Arrival, old town, Alameda – Fortifications old and older – Atop the Rock – Museums, models and an unfeasibly large gun – Gorham’s Caves, south and east
underneath the open sky 