Holidays in Gibraltar

Official national public holidays. Regional and religious observances may vary by area.

About Time in Gibraltar

Eight Years in a Cupboard

In March 1848, workers building a fortification called Forbes' Barrier at the northern end of the Rock of Gibraltar uncovered a skull in a nearby quarry. Lieutenant Edmund Flint presented it to the Gibraltar Scientific Society that same month, but nobody at the time recognised it as anything unusual, and the skull was quietly set aside, eventually ending up gathering dust in a library cupboard rather than a laboratory. It would remain there, essentially forgotten, for the better part of a decade.

Everything changed in 1856, when quarry workers in Germany's Neander Valley uncovered a strikingly similar skull, one that would go on to give an entire extinct human species its name. Only in 1862, and more fully in 1864, did scientists including George Busk and Hugh Falconer finally study the Gibraltar specimen properly and recognise what it actually was: the first adult Neanderthal skull ever found by anyone, anywhere, predating the German discovery by eight full years. Charles Darwin himself examined it in London in 1864. Had its significance been grasped at the moment of discovery rather than nearly a decade later, the species now known worldwide as Neanderthal might instead have carried a very different name, Gibraltarian or Calpican, after the Rock on which it was actually found first. A genetic study published in 2023 added a final twist, revealing that the Gibraltar skull, nicknamed Nana, is more closely related to a recently sequenced late Neanderthal individual from France than to other Neanderthal remains found much closer to Gibraltar in Spain.

One Hundred Metres, Sixteen Years

On 8 June 1969, in retaliation for a new Gibraltar constitution he regarded as provocative, Spain's dictator Francisco Franco ordered the land border with Gibraltar sealed shut. Telephone lines between the two sides were cut soon afterward, and the ferry connecting Gibraltar to the Spanish port of Algeciras made its final crossing within weeks. Families with relatives on opposite sides of a fence barely a hundred metres wide found themselves suddenly unable to see, call, or in many documented cases even properly mourn one another; oral histories collected decades later describe relatives gathering at the fence simply to shout news across the gap, including, more than once, news of a death in the family.

The closure lasted far longer than almost anyone anticipated. Franco himself died in 1975, and many Gibraltarians assumed the border would reopen soon afterward, but it took another full decade before that happened. Pedestrian crossings resumed on 15 December 1982, after thirteen years, and the frontier was not fully reopened to vehicles until 5 February 1985, sixteen years after it first slammed shut, timed to smooth Spain's entry into the European Communities the following year. Even that reopening did not end the story: routine checks and long queues persisted at the border for decades afterward, and it was not until 2025, following years of post-Brexit negotiation between Britain and the European Union, that checks were finally removed entirely, an outcome the Spanish prime minister at the ceremony marking the change described as closing "an open wound" that had, by then, been open for more than half a century in one form or another.

Three and a Half Years That Outlasted an Empire's Patience

From June 1779 to February 1783, Gibraltar endured the longest siege in British history, besieged and blockaded simultaneously by land and sea by the combined forces of Spain and France. Roughly 5,300 British, Hanoverian and Corsican troops under Governor-General George Eliott held the Rock against Spanish siege lines dug across the narrow isthmus connecting it to the mainland and a Spanish naval blockade operating out of Algeciras and Cadiz, enduring more than three and a half continuous years of bombardment, starvation and disease.

The siege coincided almost exactly with the final, decisive years of the American War of Independence, and historians have long argued that Britain's fixation on holding Gibraltar at any cost diverted resources and attention that might otherwise have gone toward the American colonies, contributing to their eventual loss. The defenders introduced genuinely novel military technology under the pressure of the prolonged siege, including red-hot cannon shot designed to set enemy ships ablaze and early shrapnel shells, innovations born directly out of the sheer duration of a conflict that dragged on for years rather than the weeks or months most contemporary sieges were expected to last.

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