It’s not easy to categorise a post as both “Interior” and “Landscape” but I’m claiming it for this one. Farewell to Gibraltar, it’s been a decent few days and if things work out I will be returning at some point.
The Barbary macaques which live in Gibraltar are the only wild primates living in Europe. They’re doing well enough — there are around 300 living on The Rock, a healthy population considering that during World War 2 numbers were down to single figures. I thoroughly enjoyed my encounters with them today, particularly the troop that lived around the mid-height pylon for the cable car, which they treated as just a big metal tree, clambering up it and then sliding back down the struts, seemingly just for the fun of it.
Gibraltar is my home for the next few days. I have been here once before, in 1991 — my “Inter-Rail Summer”, aged 21. Then, one could only enter the territory by walking across the airport runway, and this is still the case, as seen here. Presumably one gets a decent amount of notice before they close it, but let’s hope that one’s electric vehicle doesn’t run out of juice halfway across. The huge lump of limestone that is The Rock has always been a landmark, and a fortress, and the peninsula on which it and the city stands is now one of Britain’s last remaining outposts of Empire: an Overseas Territory that is sort of still part of Europe, only not. A gatepost to the Mediterranean beyond.
Being 42 