The Rock gets rolled.

• Author: Garcia, Joe
• Position: Letter from Gibraltar

ONE FOOT separates Gibraltar from Spain, that being the distance between the Spanish and the British frontier gates. You show your passport to the Spanish border guard and then, before you pass through, to the British guard as well. You are now leaving the Spanish town of La Linea to step upon the world's biggest pebble, the majestic Rock of Gibraltar, rising almost perpendicularly from sea level to some 1,400 feet at its highest point. This limestone rock of Jurassic age is the lasting symbol of British imperialism, and of injured Spanish pride at having lost it to the British 300 years ago. (It is also the symbol of The Prudential Insurance Company of America, of Newark, NJ; none of us here, truth to tell, has ever quite figured out what to make of that.)

Now, as the saying goes, you can feel as safe as the Rock of Gibraltar, but you begin to wonder as the London-like red double-decker bus begins its journey on the only road into downtown Gibraltar--which incredibly cuts across the airfield runway. The barrier is down and the jetliner from London roars as its tires grip onto an airstrip resembling an oversized aircraft carrier. Beyond Winston Churchill Avenue and an old Moorish castle is the town, which nestles on the western slopes, rising from the one-time busy naval harbor to what is now essentially a commercial and cruise ship terminal. Gibraltar is populated by 30,000 people who call it their homeland, their country.

This tiny outpost of empire is the last remaining colony in Europe, as its claimant, Spain, likes to say. It occupies just under three square miles of the Iberian peninsula, but within its minuscule dimensions it squeezes two cathedrals, four synagogues, two mosques and a Hindu temple. There are 19 banks and nearly as many companies as there are people. About 300 apes roam in the wild, as well. The homegrown Royal Gibraltar Regiment is the Rock's largest military unit; its police force is over 200-strong and is the second oldest in Britain and the Commonwealth. Gibraltar is the leading bunkering port in the Western Mediterranean and, of course, it commands the strategic Strait of Gibraltar, which separates Europe from Africa.

Just what is so important about this shining stone in the British Crown, whose intriguing past gives credence to the notion that fact can be stranger (and also more irritating) than fiction? A case can be made that its importance lies mostly in the realm of military history. But that is not how the people of Gibraltar see things today, as the British government seeks to deal away their sovereign identity and sense of repose to Spain, for equities having to do with the internal diplomacy of the European Union. Gibraltar is not about grand strategy and military history anymore; as its homeborn see it, it is about integrity about right and wrong. It is less dramatic than sieges, wars and competitive espionage, yes; does that also make it less important?

Strait and Narrow

IT ALL STARTED when a Moorish leader conquered the place in 711 C.E. and gave his name to it: Gebel Tarik, the mountain of Tarik Battles raged, and the land changed hands on numerous occasions between the Moors and the Spanish, until 1704 when an Anglo-Dutch fleet conquered it. Under the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 the Spanish Crown formally ceded sovereignty "in perpetuity" to the British Crown, but the Spanish were not particularly good to their word. Of the many sieges they staged over the years, pride of place goes to The Great Siege of 1779, which lasted three years, seven months and twelve days. The fortress, outnumbered four-to-one, was attacked with all manner of Spanish contraptions, including floating batteries, which gave the British the idea of setting them ablaze by firing red-hot cannon balls from vantage points along Gibraltar's rocky promontory. After 200,000 shots rained down, the Spanish backed off, and there followed a long period of peace. British Gibraltar became an impregnable fortress.

Through war and peace, the native Gibraltarians emerged. "In this small corner of the world there lives today a people of amazingly mixed stock who represent a fusion of very many races ... basically Genoese, but with much inter-marriage between Spaniards, Portuguese, Minorcans, Italians, persons from the British Isles, Maltese, Jews and many races of Northern Europe", wrote then-British Governor and Commander-in-Chief, General Sir Kenneth Anderson in 1950. Under British protection, this eclectically composed population increased by leaps and bounds. As it did, the British had the penchant of dividing the population into as many classes as they could think of: By 1777, in the 3,OOO-plus population, residents were known as "British Blood Native Protestant" and "British Blood Non-Native Protestant." There were also "Alien Blood Native Roman Catholics" and a wide range of combinations. By the next century the classifications had been simplified to "British from Britain", "British from Gibraltar" and "Aliens." (N owadays, we have "Gibraltarians", "Other British" and "Non British.") With no wars to fight, life must have been something of a bore, so the British decided in 1830 that their battle-scarred fortress would henceforth become a Crown Colony (which, unknown at the time, was to provoke a war of words with the Spanish in years to come...