In crowded Gibraltar, the airport runway also serves as a thoroughfare. Cyclists and pedestrians wait for an EasyJet flight from London to taxi past before they cross. Photo / Steve Hendrix, The Washington Post
Nine years after the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union - over Gibraltar’s stringent objections - Gibraltarians have become the Brits who beat Brexit after all.
After nearly a decade in limbo and years of negotiations, a treaty announced in June and set to come into effect over coming months, will scrap most barriers to travel and trade that went up after Britain’s divorce from the EU became official at the end of 2020.
Some 40,000 Gibraltarians will regain what millions of travelling Brits miss most: the ability to wander unfettered, without passports or time limits, throughout the EU’s Schengen area, a visa free-travel zone of 29 countries.
Visitors to this tiny UK territory at the southern tip of Europe - an unlikely exclave of double-decker buses and beans for breakfast at the mouth of the Mediterranean - often say the people here are “more British than the British”.
That’s no surprise: Gibraltar has been British since a Spanish king gave up “the Rock” 300 years ago.
Last Wednesday, the Union Jacks and hard cider were blowing and flowing on Gibraltar’s biggest civic holiday. “Keep Calm it’s National Day” read one publican’s shirt as he pulled pints for residents commemorating the September 10, 1967, vote by Gibraltarians to stay British, flatly rejecting efforts by Madrid to gain even partial control. (It passed by 99.64%.)
This year, the crowds filling Casemates Square were not just celebrating sticking with Britain, but also an unexpected reunion with Europe.
Once the treaty comes into force, the historically contentious land border where prickly Spanish police sometimes slow crossings to a crawl - including delays last July on the day after England defeated Spain in the European women’s soccer championship - will disappear completely.
A new customs union will also let many goods flow back and forth without checks, something Gibraltar didn’t even enjoy before the Brexit vote.
“After a lot of hard work, I think we have seized success from the jaws of defeat,” said Chief Minister Fabian Picardo, Gibraltar’s top elected official, still sweaty minutes after hailing Gibraltar’s reunification with Europe in a speech to a cheering crowd.
Canon-fired confetti floated in the air and dance music bounced off the 425m limestone monolith looming over the city. The Rock was rockin’.
“This is actually going to be an improvement over where Gibraltar was pre-Brexit,” Picardo said.
As much as they love being British, Gibraltarians - a conglomeration of Anglo, Spanish, Italian, Maltese, Moroccan, and other ethnicities who mostly speak with vaguely English accents - had no interest in distancing themselves from Europe.
Unlike most Brits, of course, they actually live there, along with hundreds of tailless Barbary macaques, Europe’s last population of wild-roaming monkeys.
In 2016, Gibraltar was the first UK voting area to report results in the Brexit referendum, and its 96% vote to remain in the EU was “by far” the highest of any precinct, according to a parliamentary analysis.
Their biggest worry was the border with Spain, only three quarters of a mile long but a centuries-old irritant to Spanish nationalists who want Gibraltar back no matter what the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht says about ceding it to the Crown of Great Britain “forever, without any exception or impediment whatsoever”.
Tensions ebbed and flowed over centuries as Gibraltar, perched over the skinny western mouth of the Mediterranean, served as a vital and heavily armed naval base for Britain and its allies. President Dwight D. Eisenhower directed the invasion of North Africa from one of the tunnels cut through the Rock.
Over time, Gibraltar gained more autonomy from London, becoming a British Overseas Territory that elects its own parliament for domestic affairs and relies on the UK for defence and foreign relations.
Relations with its neighbour bottomed out after Gibraltar’s overwhelming 1967 vote to reject any power-sharing agreement with Spain. Two years later, Spanish dictator Francisco Franco reacted to this resounding snub by sealing the border entirely.
For 16 years, Gibraltarians relied on sea shipments and airlifts from the UK for vital goods. The only place to fit a runway is directly across the entire width of the isthmus. Traffic and pedestrians still traverse the runway between take-offs and landings, like at a railroad crossing.
During the blockade, those with family just across the frontier had to travel by ferry across the Gibraltar Strait to North Africa and then back again to La Linea, the adjacent town in Spain.
Carl Viagas, a local architect and historian, recalls Homerian ferry journeys just to reach a relative’s home 1.5km away.
“After all of that, I could still look over and see my own house,” he said.
Viagas is overseeing the excavation of a warren of tunnels throughout the Rock’s northern face, dozens of passages and cannon galleries that Gibraltarians have used to defend against sieges for centuries.
“We’ve been cut off before,” he said, standing in one of the 18th-century batteries pointing at Spain. “What Franco did in closing the border was to strengthen our identity as Gibraltarians and as British. What we do not want to be is Spanish.”
For some, the vote to pull Britain, and therefore Gibraltar, out of the EU sparked border post-traumatic stress. In response, a hawkish foreign minister in Madrid immediately called for joint sovereignty.
A long uneasy limbo followed. The parties agreed to set the Gibraltar questions aside as London negotiated priority issues, including its overall exit agreement with the EU, and the complex border between Ireland and British Northern Ireland.
Airlifts, of a sort, returned when EU rules hindered the import of British dairy products, and Morrisons, the biggest British grocer in the exclave, flew in emergency Christmas puddings by charter.
Border tensions flared periodically, but Gibraltar - which can’t squeeze factories or farms beneath the steep slopes of the Rock - doubled down on financial and digital services to fuel growth. Today it is a major hub for cryptocurrency and online gambling.
Almost one-third of UK car insurance is issued by Gibraltar-based companies. In August, a UK-Gibraltar start-up announced plans for a US$2.4 billion artificial intelligence data processing facility at the main port.
With a per capita gross domestic product that puts it among the top-10 wealthiest OECD countries, Gibraltar’s co-dependence on Spanish labour has grown.
More than 15,000 Spanish nurses, waiters and construction workers cross the border daily, links that softened views among some Spaniards.
On the Spanish side of the border on a recent morning, Juan Gutierrez, 70, was selling fresh baguettes and molletes to the workers streaming towards the crossing.
“As a Spanish person, I would like Gibraltar to be Spanish,” Gutierrez said as he watched the commuters, among them, his daughter, two nieces and several cousins. “As a La Linea person, I think we’re better off this way.”
Gibraltar spends more than US$2b a year on goods from southern Spain and is the second biggest employer for of the region of Andalusia, said Joseph Garcia, Gibraltar’s deputy chief minister and the lead negotiator in recent treaty talks. “A hard border would have put all that in jeopardy.”
Talks on a final status between the UK, the EU, Gibraltar and Spain picked up speed in recent years, Garcia said, under both Conservative and Labour governments in London, and Spain’s centre-left government.
In June, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez announced the deal.
After the treaty is ratified, possibly by the end of the year, all passport controls will be carried out by Gibraltar and EU agents inside the airport, and the land border will effectively evaporate. Once on the Rock, Europe will be wide open.
Gibraltar will not regain full EU membership - its residents will have no right to work or live anywhere in the bloc, for example. But the access to travel, and to buy and sell across the EU’s single market, will be better than ever, residents say.
“The treaty as it is now is something we all dreamed of and prayed for,” said Len Goss, a business consultant.
Goss’ phone is ringing more as business owners take note of Gibraltar’s soon-to-be-settled status as a portal to both Britain and the EU. More Brits from the homeland are also inquiring about life in this place where you can get fish-and-chips and free-range Europe.
Gibraltar’s next problem might be too much Britain.
“We will have to very carefully reformulate how we permit British and other people to come and be residents of Gibraltar,” said Picardo.
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