Early on Friday morning, 2020-02-14, we were up and on our way to our final destination: Gibraltar. To get to 'the Rock', all we had to do was drive through town and there it was.
Easy peasy. Things to see and things to do before we departed for our home away in Portugal.
Well, things weren't quite as straightforward as they first appeared.
Gibraltar is a British overseas territory sitting at the tip of Spain, land that the kingdom of Spain sees at it's own. The territory was captured from Spain during the War of the Spanish Succession and was ceded to Great Britain in perpetuity under the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. For the British, on the other hand, it was vital during the second world war and it remains strategically important, with half the world's seaborne trade passing through the strait.
Gibraltar is a tiny enclave, with emphasis on the word, tiny. In spite of that, while the Spanish don't want to make it easy for tourists to pass through the border, over 15,000 Spanish workers enter each day to support this enclave of 43,000 British citizens and other residents.
Not only does Gibraltar have a tiny population, it has an extremely tiny usable surface area.
The total surface area of Gibraltar is 6.7 km². Compare that to the size of McMaster University (1.52 km²) or the Royal Botanical Gardens in Hamilton/Burlington (9.80 km²); the Glenmore Reservoir in Calgary (3.84 km²); the site of Expo '67 by Montréal (3.65 km²). And most of the its surface area is unusable rock!