The Road from Santiago

  Honesty is reckoned to be the best policy - albeit one which would have most world leaders not much time to get on with ruling after they have fessed up to a backlog of woeful obscurance.  Today we will pass nothing of note. Much as I love you I am not dashing across the A-7 to get to the Thai restaurant.  We will end the day on a ghost road, a remnant of the new A-383.  We will be near the Arroyo de la Mujer.  That’s it. We’ve done Tangiers. Let us do Gibraltar. It is a somewhat defensible rock on the Med. So it has been for the last 5.33 million years - give or take being a bit more in land during Ice Ages.  Actually, the last time the Med dried up aka Messinian salinity crisis has a neat video on its wiki page so here is the link. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messinian_salinity_crisis The most famous early inhabitants of the rock were the Neanderthals, who were busy dying out about 50,000 years ago. The Phoenicians turned up about 950BC and diverse ot...

  Yesterday we went into, not so much my Mind Palace, as my Attic of Historical Artifacts viz Algreciras. Why stop there.  As today we will be mainly trooping round a very well tended suburbia, lets have a Gib preface.  Enter Tangiers. When France and Spain were carving up Protectorates in Morocco in the early 20th century Tangiers was not quite dealt with. Eventually it became an International Zone and so it remained till 14th June 1940, when Franco  took advantage of a distracted world to occupy the place. Given Blighty hadn’t caved in to the Nazi Menace, in November 1940 it was agreed that the city could be occupied if Spain didn’t fortify the place and British rights were respected. It is believed that the general shenanigans  in Tangiers was the model for the film Casablanca.  In October 1945 Tangiers reverted to being an International City until Morocco gained independence in the 1950s. But this isn’t the point of today's lecture. By the 1660s England...

  Generally all of life is on one spectrum or another. Take knowledge.  At the one end are people who horde it and use it to bludgeon people who clearly are dullards because they didn’t know what reform movement Pope John X supported - the Cluniacs, but you know that. On the other end is the free sharing of the stuff because it is more joyful to have people to share with that King George I divorced his misses in 1684 - which makes him the third English monarch to be divorced, I think.  Footnotes are available. I say all this because we are nearing but will never go to Algeciras.  Algeciras first appeared in my consciousness as a conference venue [1906] in GCSE answers.  I know you want to know this, so this was sorting out the issue of which European powers were going to nab Morocco.  The French got most of it, Spain got a bit and Germany got the hump.  I think it was only when we stayed in Malaga I found out it was near Gib and only when writing this ...

  Of we go to the end of it all.  We will pass the Ibrahim-al-Ibrahim Mosque, which was inaugurated in 1997, and so on to Europa Point.  It has been reviewed 161 people who reckon, as bits of geography go, it deserves 4.4 stars.  Michael came here a month a go and gives us a very full account [and four stars]. ‘Europa Point Scenic Spot is the southernmost point of Gibraltar, renowned for its spectacular panoramic views across the Strait of Gibraltar to North Africa. Highlights include the historic red-and-white striped lighthouse dating from 1841, the Ibrahim al-Ibrahim Mosque, the Sikorski Monument, and Harding's Battery. This windswept vantage point offers a unique blend of maritime history and breathtaking natural beauty.’ We are turning back. I wanted to go up the east side but you can’t walk round it and we aren’t going to break the law by nipping along road. Thus we will wander back the settled, western side, and get a really good idea of just how crowded this ...