Sometimes the search for words to describe a place becomes the journey itself.
My friend and I had spent the afternoon with wild monkeys perched on our heads. We had witnessed smugglers with cigarettes stuffed in their pants trying to make a break for Spain, and Muslim women in head scarves sharing narrow stone sidewalks with the nattily dressed descendants of King Philip. We had dined on baked beans over Texas toast in the company of chain-smoking Jamaican hash dealers.
Now, as our day in Gibraltar ended, Mai-Trang attempted to find the perfect words to capture the essence of our experience on this tiny peninsula within sight of Africa.
Dude, she said, that was totally weird.
Gibraltar is both charming and strange, a bizarre slice of British imperialistic pie lapping at the Mediterranean Sea. We had reached Gibraltar by car, traveling on the highway that follows the bending southern coast of Spain, a sunny grin with water dribbled at its chin: white-washed settlements for teeth; Cadiz on one cheek and Malaga on the other. After parking in the border town of La Linea de la Concepcion, we walked to Gibraltar, flashing our passports at a customs agent, barely slowing our stride as we left Spain and stepped onto Her Majesty’s soil.
The colony has been in British hands since 1704, a chronic irritant for Spain, which lost a fierce, bloody battle in the 18th century to regain control of Gibraltar’s 2 1/2 square miles. As part of the dispute now fanning three centuries, Spain closed the border to Gibraltar in 1969 and kept it shut for 13 years. The fact that we could now stroll into Gibraltar from Spain was no minor diplomatic triumph.
The wind whipped at us as we made our way across the airstrip under a sudden cloud cover; amazing, it was, how the British had managed to import their weather. Traffic was light the day we visited in the spring, and we soon discovered why: It was Commonwealth Day, a national holiday for British outposts that shuts down most of the commercial trade. “Only the Indian stores are open,” one shopkeeper informed me, proudly, defiantly, one former colonized person to one former colonist.
We hadn’t come for overpriced British goods anyway. We had come primarily for the monkeys. Gibraltar is famous for its “Rock apes,” which live at the top of the Rock of Gibraltar, the jutting mass of stone that is one twin of the Pillars of Hercules set. (The other is Mount Hacho on the African side of the Strait of Gibraltar.) Michael Brufal de Melgarejo, of the Friends of Gibraltar Heritage Society, said the human inhabitants of Gibraltar regard the monkeys “as their best friends in the animal world.” And for good reason. Not only are the monkeys Gibraltar’s top tourist attraction, legend has it that as long as the monkeys live on the rock, the colony will remain British. When the population dwindled to seven in 1944, it is said that Winston Churchill ordered reinforcements from North Africa.
The monkeys have ascended to revered status. They roam the rock unmolested and sometimes venture down into town, at the base of the rock. When a group of waiting taxi drivers spotted blood on the road during our visit, they immediately called a veterinarian to search out the wounded creature and then clicked their tongues in despair until the vet showed up.
To reach the monkeys, you have to ascend the rock, either by foot, cable car or taxi. For the height-challenged — that would be me — the cable car is probably not the best option, unless you like dangling over the side of jagged limestone. The cable car, which costs $10 round trip, has one major drawback: It doesn’t go to the very top of the rock. Only the taxis or your feet will get you there, and hiking the 1,400-foot-high rock takes about two hours.
Following the monkeys up the rock is an excellent way to experience the rock itself. The Cathedral Cave at the site was long believed to be bottomless, giving rise to the story that Gibraltar was connected to Africa by an underground tunnel. And because almost every story in Gibraltar at some point returns to the monkeys — or the feud with Spain — this, as one theory goes, was the route the monkeys traveled to get to Gibraltar.
More than 200 monkeys inhabit Gibraltar, traveling in packs of about 30. There are now so many of them that the government is considering birth control to keep the population in check. Some monkeys are sent to zoos in other parts of the world; others have been transported to Africa to help repopulate areas in which they are becoming extinct.
All sorts of theories are traded over just how the monkeys came to be on the rock. The Gibraltar Tourist Board acknowledged that there is no “official” version but offered up the most widely accepted theory: British troops returning from Africa brought them to Gibraltar as pets sometime in the 1700s. A less-embraced theory says the monkeys are descendants of an ancient European breed that survived on Gibraltar after becoming extinct elsewhere.
We saw our first monkeys outside St. Michael’s Cave, lounging on picnic benches, meandering down the road and ignoring us like zoo animals who’d seen one too many camera-toting tourist.
The monkeys are technically called Barbary macaques or Macaca sylvanus. They are light brown and tailless, which is why they are often confused with or referred to as apes.
The taxi drivers all seem to have a favorite pack of monkeys with whom they’ve made attachments over the years. Our driver met up with his tailless fan club near the Queen’s Gate, also known as the Apes’ Den. The Gibraltar Ornithological and Natural History Society, which is in charge of caring for the monkeys, repeatedly issues warnings not to feed the monkeys. But our driver had a bag of peanuts and proceeded to offer them to the monkeys clustered around our taxi. He encouraged them to stand on our shoulders or sit on our heads, while we snapped photographs. You tolerate a monkey climbing on your head because you are there to see the monkeys and the driver says the most it will do is urinate down your back, which fortunately, it did not.
The largest pack of monkeys lives around the Great Siege Tunnels, which were initially built to defend Gibraltar from French and Spanish forces trying to reclaim the rock during the American Revolution. The tunnels were expanded during World War II and now cover more than 30 miles, a portion of which are open to visitors.
Gibraltar today is very much a reflection of its diverse past; the ancient Greeks, Phoenicians, Visigoths and Romans all dropped by for a drink or a conquer. Gibraltar remained under Moorish domination for seven centuries and only came under Spanish control in the 14th century. That lasted for just 24 years. Spain got the rock back in 1462 and hung on to it until 1704, when the British wrestled it away. Under the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, Spain ceded Gibraltar to the British.
And thus it has remained, defiantly British and oddly Spanish and Moorish-influenced in almost every way, from the English pubs that serve both fish and chips and a curry of the day to the ethnic diversity reflected in the Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, English and Maltese faces on the streets.
About 30,000 residents inhabit Gibraltar, most of them in the quaintly British town at the base of the rock. The main industries are tourism, banking and finance, and ship building and repair. In recent years, the United Kingdom has reduced its military presence, helping Gibraltar make the shift from a public to a private-sector economy, although British forces are still responsible for protecting the rock.
Yet it is Spanish weather that rules Gibraltar, with hot summers and mild winters. In spite of their geographical link to Spain, the people of Gibraltar remain loyal to their British charges. Last year, in a constitutional referendum, voters overwhelmingly rejected a resolution to cede to Spain.
Spain and the United Kingdom continue to discuss “shared sovereignty” in effort to resolve their 300-year-old dispute. While the British government has pledged to allow Gibraltarians to make the decision, the residents remain suspicious that they will be left out of the debate. The topic is a hot, passionate one, never far behind talk about the monkeys.
These odd tailess creatures are certainly a huge part of Gibraltar’s draw. But the best reason to visit might simply be because it is there, this odd limestone landmark with an uncertain political future and the cultural influences of a city traded like a playing card through its history.