Gibraltar

The Rock

Gibraltar is a narrow limestone peninsula on Spain’s southern Mediterranean coast, just northeast of the Strait of Gibraltar and directly south of the Spanish town of La Línea. It is about 5 km long and 1.2 km wide, joined to Spain by an isthmus about 1.6 km long.^[1] Morocco is about 15 km away across the strait.^[4]

Its name comes from the Arabic Jabal Ṭāriq, Mount Tariq, after the Muslim commander Ṭāriq ibn Ziyād, who captured it in 711.^[1] Spain ended Muslim rule in 1462, and Isabella I annexed Gibraltar to Spain in 1501.^[3]

Taken in 1704, ceded in 1713

In 1704, during the War of the Spanish Succession, Sir George Rooke captured Gibraltar for the British, and Spain formally ceded it to Britain in the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713.^[3] Spain tried several times to take it back, most famously in a siege that lasted from 1779 to 1783.^[3]

Gibraltar became a British crown colony in 1830, and the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 made Britain more determined to keep it. It was a repair and assembly point for Allied convoys in both World Wars.^[3]

Decolonisation, and a closed border

In the 1960s Spain pressed for Gibraltar’s “decolonization”. In a referendum in 1967 Gibraltarians chose between Spanish sovereignty and staying with Britain, and voted 12,138 to 44 to stay.^[3] The UN General Assembly declared the referendum a breach of its earlier resolutions and asked the two governments to negotiate an end to “the colonial situation in Gibraltar” while safeguarding the population’s interests.^[2]

Britain’s new constitution for Gibraltar in 1969 reaffirmed the link with Britain and gave it full internal self-government.^[3] On 8 June 1969 General Franco’s Spain closed the frontier gates, cutting Gibraltar off from its neighbour; the Government of Gibraltar describes the closure as part of Franco’s “policy of coercion”.^[5] The border reopened for people on foot in 1982, and fully on 5 February 1985, as Spain prepared to join the European Community.^[5]

“Invites the Governments of Spain and the United Kingdom … to resume without delay the negotiations … with a view to putting an end to the colonial situation in Gibraltar and to safeguarding the interests of the population”^[2]

Joint sovereignty rejected

In a referendum in 2002 that neither government recognised, 99% of Gibraltar’s voters rejected joint British-Spanish sovereignty, and both governments afterwards let Gibraltar speak for itself in talks on its future.^[3] A three-way forum was set up in 2004, and in 2009 a Spanish minister visited Gibraltar for the first time since 1704.^[3] Gibraltarians have had full British citizenship since 1981, and a new constitution approved in 2006 created the Gibraltar Parliament.^[3]

Brexit and the open border

About 96% of Gibraltar’s voters chose to remain in the EU in the 2016 referendum, but it left with the rest of the UK in January 2020.^[1] It had never been in the Schengen area, so the crossing at La Línea was one of western Europe’s last controlled internal borders.^[1]

The UK and the EU signed a treaty for Gibraltar in Brussels on 14 July 2026, and from the next day people no longer had to pass a physical border. About 15,000 people, more than half of Gibraltar’s workforce, cross every day. The treaty in effect brings Gibraltar into Schengen, with British and Spanish officers checking travellers at its airport and port, while the UK says it safeguards British sovereignty.^[4][1]