1. The UK in Spanish-speaking

The Rock of Gibraltar is an interesting place for many reasons. First and most obvious of all are the many British elements around the place. Yes, it is counted as part of Great Britain, but it has enough Spanish elements to make the British ones look very much out of place. Red telephone boxes, London-like policemen in green fluorescent jackets, BBC news on the televisions, the use of pounds as a currency, not to mention the many British high street shops and banks in the town centre. All of these items were around palm trees, many Spanish-speaking people, warm weather and right-hand driving. It’s a sight that takes a while to get used to, however, after I did, the charm of it all becomes quite apparent.

2. British people everywhere

The majority of tourists there were British which makes sense as it’s not a very drastic transition from place to place (well, minus what was mentioned in the previous point), there were a few Spanish, although the majority of them actually worked on the peninsula, and even fewer tourists from other parts of the world.

The morning and the early afternoon crowd were mostly young families and elderly people, lots of elderly people. It almost felt like it was a retreat for old British folk on our first morning there, we were shocked by the sheer amount of them at first, but it wasn’t long till we got used to it. In the late afternoon and evening, the crowd got younger and after the sun went down on the pubs and bars were filled with young Brits on different levels of intoxication. It wasn’t as rowdy as the atmosphere in Brighton, but I have a feeling it might have ended up that way if we stayed out a bit longer.

3. The Spanish border

As I’ve mentioned before Gibraltar is part of the UK, not Spain, so in order to get to Spain, one would have to go through border control. Now living in England for most of my life I had never seen the border of two different counties on the same land before, especially one that was so busy. There was always a traffic jam going through it and being so close to the airport didn’t help since people were probably also driving from either side to get there. I heard that most of the people that work in Gibraltar actually live in Spain and commute in every day which definitely must have added to its numbers. Although I didn’t see as many people as cars going through, there were a handful tourists and locals waddling through every so often, in fact, we even gave it a go.

I’d never been to Spain before and even setting a foot in for five seconds was good enough for me. To our surprise it was incredibly simple, just flash a passport which the border control really didn’t bother to scrutinise, walk through a few doors and voila, ‘Bienvenido a España’. The difference between the places was immediate, everything was in written in Spanish, the colour palette architecture included more oranges and yellows, and the place felt, less looked after. Streets were littered there was more vandalism around, and the few people we saw weren’t as well dressed. Nevertheless, we enjoyed the food from the Spanish McDonalds restaurant before heading back to familiar ground.

4. Gibraltar Airport runway

This is something Hannah picked up on immediately but I didn’t notice until we landed from England. As the plane started approaching the short runway we noticed traffic and pedestrians waiting behind a red and white barrier on either side, as a train was about to pass. At first, I took no notice of this. It wasn’t until after we landed were the barriers lifted and the traffic moved, across the runway. I had never seen anything like it, I knew that the peninsula was small but I wasn’t aware it was so small its airport runway had to intersect with a busy road. To make matters more interesting, the main road from Gibraltar to Spain cut through the airport, so not only did traffic accumulate from the border control–but also traffic from the airport runway barriers. We experienced this first had when we discovered we had to walk across the runway to get to our hotel, I couldn’t stop looking around at how close I was to the planes and ground support equipment.

5. Monkeys

The rock of Gibraltar isn’t called that for the same of it, there is an enormous rock that makes up almost a quarter of the land, naturally, this was the main tourist attraction. In order to reach the summit, we took the cable car which showed amazing views of the peninsula from a great height. Once up it was possible to view attractions such as the Moorish castle and St. Michael’s Cave which, although we didn’t personally visit, I heard promising things about, and last but not least, the monkeys, lots of them all over the rock, for people to look at and take pictures of which was pretty much all you were allowed to do. No petting, no feeding, no taunting them, and definitely no plastic bags in sight of them. We saw first hand what happened when someone showed off their white bag they must have got from a food shop, all their belongings fell to the ground when a primate ripped it open and scavenged for things inside before being chased away by a larger one. The monkeys were very confident and would climb onto car roofs, peoples heads and would not flinch or move away no matter how close someone got to them.

6. Swift marriage

The main reason Hannah and I were in Gibraltar was to get married, legally. Doing it in the UK would have involved both of our councils and taken over a month which wasn’t ideal for us. A friend of ours suggested we Gibraltar as a possible solution since their laws allowed for a legal marriage in 24 hours. The other option was, of course, Las Vegas, however, we had no intention of making a quick trip there just before our wedding.

Being one of the only [few] places in Europe that allow for a quick marriage is one thing that makes Gibraltar very unique, whilst there we saw many people who were married and spoke to others who planned to do the same. The queue to the registry was incredibly long, and although most of those looking to get married were British (surprise surprise), there were a few others from different parts of the world. This law no doubt helps with their economy, tourism and is probably one of the reasons why the hotels were incredibly expensive.

7. Pricey hotels

To be fair, we did book the hotel quite late, and I’m sure it would be much cheaper to book a hotel in Spain and travel into Gibraltar, however, our predicament didn’t allow that. In order to be legally married in Gibraltar, both participants had to spend a period of 24 hours in a Gibraltar hotel, not a Spanish one. To my understanding, this was a law introduced by the hotels to make some money for couples aspiring to be married which, makes sense but it’s very sneaky considering they were around 5 times more expensive than hotels across the border. There are only a handful of hotels on the great Rock so a lot of them were fully booked so I guess that’s one explanation for their hefty price tags, and the one that we did end up booking had a pool, a gym, and a games room, and some amazing Mediterranean views from our room, or at least we were told. The gym and games room matched the size of a bedroom in a studio flat, the pool was being refurbished and was out of order until the following year, as a result, the hotel was surrounded by scaffolding blocking out any picturesque scenery from our windows. Our request for a discount of some sort wasn’t completely honoured, I mean we had to stay in order to fulfil the task we were there to do in the first place, so we were in their hands more than they were in ours.

In conclusion, would we visit Gibraltar again? It’s very unlikely as there isn’t much to do and we visited most of the popular attractions, but there is a chance we might ‘pop over’ if we’re around that part of Spain. Did we have a good time there? Yes, it was fun. We had a beautiful legal marriage in The Alameda botanical gardens, our wedding assistants were fantastic, and the whole ordeal was fairly smooth. Would I recommend it? If you’re in Europe and want to get married quickly then I can think of no better place. On the other hand, if you’re looking for somewhere interesting to travel to, Gibraltar is great for observing the British items on the land, but there is no need to spend longer than a week there as there is a chance you might get bored.

Ollie