By the time I left Jimena de la Frontera every single item of clothing I owned had been worn at least once, not everything had dried from my search for the Moorish Queen’s Bath, I was starting to get sick, and it was still raining.
A train ride followed by a bus ride and I found myself mere minutes from the border with Gibraltar in a town called La Línea de la Concepción. Although I was staying in La Línea, I didn’t see much of it other than the area right around the border. This part of town felt like a poorly aging beach town. Or maybe it was just off season.
I’d heard the famous Laurie Lee quote that Gibraltar was a “a piece of Portsmouth sliced off and towed 500 miles south.” But to be honest Gibraltar didn’t feel very British to me, and it certainly didn’t feel English, despite the red phone boxes at every turn. The town itself is basically a giant duty free shop. If you can imagine the duty free shopping area at London Heathrow as an open air mall, you’d be pretty close to what the main drag of Gibraltar is like. The service workers were mostly Spanish; I actually had to use Spanish more in Gibraltar than any other location since I’d left Granada at that point.
My one full day in Gibraltar dawned less rainy but windy. I had originally planned to take the cable car up to the top of the Rock and walk back down. When I found out the cable car was closed due to the wind, I didn’t feel up for walking both up and down the Rock, so I did a “taxi tour” instead. This had the added benefit that I actually met a llanito (Gibraltarian).
The view from the top was amazing. It still blows my mind that you can actually see Africa. The day I went up had a lot of haze between the two continents, but I could still clearly make out the opposite shore.
The taxi tours also stop at “Ape’s Den”, where the local macaque population hangs out. I was warned that the macaques could be pretty aggressive, but I still didn’t expect one of the babies to jump on me as soon as I stepped out of the taxi and proceed to chomp down on my arm! Fortunately the adults were rather uninterested in us.
More photos from the trip down the Rock and around Gibraltar town:
