Monkeying Around in Gibraltar

We left Malaga on Friday Dec 27th and arrived early evening into Gibraltar. The Rock was very impressive as we came toward it with dramatic weather all around:

The Rock of Gibraltar has been occupied by the British since 1704 and the town of Gibraltar is "very" British, of course. Lots of fish and chips…

The first of the apes that we saw were actually in downtown wrecking havoc and dumping over the trash cans and entertaining all of us tourists:

We took a tour of the Rock and found it all very interesting. The views were magnificent and we could see across to the mountains of Morocco.

There was also a big cave with perfect acoustics used for many local concerts. The myth is that it is a bottomless cave that transverses under the Mediterranean to Morocco and that's how the apes came across to the Rock. 

So here is the story according to our tour guide about the apes--first of all they are called apes and not monkeys because they have no tails. In WWII Winston Churchill saw that some of the military men would bring a few apes across from Morocco as pets, so he decided to bring 26 apes across and release them on the Rock. He then declared that as long as there were apes on the Rock of Gibraltar, it would be held by the British. And so it is…

And so as we were driving up to see the apes, one jumped onto the car and came in the window. Richard and i were sitting up front with the driver and were fairly startled.

                                   

 

As you can see, we were completely taken with the apes and had the best time watching them and letting them entertain and engage with us. Monkeying around with them was the best. They had no hesitation in jumping on my head and sitting on Richard's arm. Of course they are relatively tame from all of the interaction with the tourists. As we were having our picture taken by one of them, he had no qualms about picking my pocket….

                         

       

We were told that there are 14 miles of road around the Rock and 40 miles of tunnels inside of the Rock. It was used and still is used for military purposes. We were able to tour on tunnel inside. There were many canons situated inside, all pointing toward Spain.

Looking down from the Rock we could see our Marina where EcstaSea is berthed for the moment. As you can see the airport runway is right beside the harbor.

The other side of the airport runway is Spain and you can see the road running right through the middle of it. They stop the cars on the road when an airplane is landing or taking off from the runway. Pretty wild….

This next picture shows us standing at the top of the Rock with the Mediterranean sea behind us to our right and the Atlantic sea behind us to our left. We are at the gateway and our next leg of the journey will be leaving here through the Straits of Gibraltar and moving on down the Moroccan coast to the Canary Islands.

So monkeying around here in Gibraltar has been great fun and now we are ready to move on….