Sheilaclapkin's Blog;

Gibraltar

All of your life you have seen the icon The Rock of Gibraltar as being strength of the mighty monolith. The Rock icon is a real place and it is a place with a strong and long history and a tenacity to continue to build and reclaim land all around its perimeter. Gibraltar is an amazing place and an honor and privilege to visit there. It covers only 7 miles of property and every inch is used.  I am repeating only what our guide for the day told us. First it was owned by Spain, of course, it is connected to Spain. Then somehow during the War of the Spanish Succession, the Gibraltar peninsula was ceded to Britain by Spain.  Now, this is the part that opened my eyes and dropped my jaw. Spain has made attempts to re-claim the territory, but in the last treaty signed by Britain and Spain, it is stated that the territory would belong to Britain as long as they had monkeys and Jews living on the rock.  I am not making this up. You can tell me I am wrong, but I am not.

Spain will never get their land back, because they have 30,000 Jews living there and wait, they have monkeys living there as well. Lots of them, so you see Spain is not going to get Gibraltar back anytime soon. This is where the situation is now, but history has shown that many countries have claimed Gibraltar each leaving its mark on the area.

Let me show you the monkeys living on Gibraltar, and I only met one Jew, Solomon Levi and have no photo for proof.

Today when we drove right up to the rock, we needed to exit one bus and walk through customs with our passports out opened to the first page. Once on the other side, we walked and boarded another vehicle and drove to a building to fill out paperwork that would allow us to drive up or climb up the rock.  And by the way when we left we had to take two busses out and show our passports again.

We had to wait at the light going into Gibraltar and going out as well. Planes used the main road as an airport runway and when a plane is going to be taking off or landing, you have to stop and wait until the red lights turn green. This can happen quite a number of times a day. Everyone is patient.

Photo shows us waiting for the plane to take off. I really tried to get the photo of the plane passing through, but just got the lights.

When we learned that the peninsula of Gibraltar is at the confluence of the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea, we stood and looked for a long time. It seems so interesting that the water just splits and one goes one way and the other goes another.

Back to Gibraltar: It is tiny, they reclaimed lots of land since the original fortress walls were built. They originally had not water source, and used a rainwater catching method of getting water. Now they use desalinization process. We bought bottled water.

There are no taxes; everything is duty free.  They have tiny little alleyways for streets and most all of them are one way. There are 34 miles of tunnels as well as a massive network inside the bowels of the Rock because Britain believed that there was going to an attack by Germany and the network of tunnels would make Gibraltar a fortress!

We noticed during our short, but wonderful visit that everyone works well with each other. I did not hear one horn sound the entire day. Tiny Gibraltar has everything any city has and more. Every inch is used and has a purpose. A visit to this lovely Rock is an adventure and well worth the effort to be there and to share this culture.