A rock and a hard place

 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 other people occupied the place. The Moors built a watchtower in the twelfth century; Castile took it in 1309, lost it in 1333 and finally regained it in 1462. Alfonso XI died of the Black Death in 1450 - while besieging the place, which may be considered unfortunate.

In 1700 the Habsburg experiment to see just how many cousins you could marry before you couldn’t anymore came to its end when Charles II died. According to Adam Rutherford young Carlos would have been less inbred if his parents had just been brother and sister.  France supported Philip of Anjou and everybody else favoured Charles of Austria. To this end Sir George Rooke was sent with a fleet to make mischief.

Rooke had failed to Barcelona to revolt or seize Cadiz. Abandoning a plan to take Toulon he hit upon the cunning wheeze of seizing Gibraltar.  The attack went in on 1st August 1704. Anglo-Dutch marines, commanded by Prince George of Hesse-Darmstadt and Captain Whitaker occupied land, the navy bombarded and on 4th the place surrendered.


Gib was useful as a base but also as an place to be bargained for.  Between 1713 and 1728 the rock was considered as an exchangeable asset on seven occasions - much to Parliament’s displeasure.  I feel the editor of the wiki page on its History has a certain Spanish perspective.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Gibraltar  Apparently they Brits did terrible things, like letting Moors and Jews live there.  I find smuggling such a harsh word - why not call it free trade. :-)  

Gibraltar was attacked at various times. The Great Siege was from 24th June 1779 to 7th February 1783. A Franco-Spanish fleet blockaded the place, Spanish troops constructed forts and diverse reliefs and sallies took place till a wider peace was agreed.

The building of the Suez Canal increased the important of the place.  A young Ben Disraeli visited and described the dwellers of the rock as a mix of  "Moors with costumes as radiant as a rainbow or Eastern melodrama, Jews with gaberdines and skull-caps, Genoese, Highlanders and Spanish."

The Second World War saw the place in threat.  Franco wanted to take the place but the effort of it did not seem cost effective to the Germans - who really didn’t want to pay the cost of rebuilding Spain after the Civil War as the entry fee for access to the rock.  The civilian population was evacuated, mainly to Madeira and Jamaica - but also to Tangiers.  Convoys mustered at Gibraltar, the Invasion of North West Africa was commanded from it and the place was bombed on occasion.  Vichy France sent a few bombers over and the Italians made 10 attempts, from 17 July 1940 through to 19 July 1943.

After the War Gibraltar became one of those places where Franco would get vexed about when he needed a distraction and was being absented minded about Ceuta and Melilla. It did seem a bit of an oddity in a world of decolonisation however, as the locals were not keen on joining Spain things go a bit tetchy.  A referendum in 1967 saw 12138 vote to stay with the UK, 44 wanting to join Spain and 55 ballots were blank or invalid.  Franco put this down to pseudo-Gibraltarians voting, not the real ones descended from the Spanish - citation needed on that one.  Every so often the border got closed.

Well, that’s it, time to hunker down for the night.





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