The Genoese Fishermen of Catalan Bay

25 June 2026 Last checked 2026-06-25

Behind the painted houses of Catalan Bay lies a Genoese fishing village whose families spoke their own Ligurian dialect well into the twentieth century.

For more than two centuries, the families crowded into the painted houses of Catalan Bay spoke to one another in a language almost no one else in Gibraltar fully understood. It was not Spanish, not English and not quite Italian. It was a Ligurian dialect carried across the sea from Genoa by fishermen in the early 1700s, and villagers were still using it well into the 20th century.

Cross to the eastern flank of the Rock today and you find a curve of sand, a small church and a cluster of tall, brightly coloured houses pressed beneath the cliffs. Most visitors come for the swimming. Almost none of them know they are standing in the village that held on to a Mediterranean dialect longer than anywhere else on the Rock.

A village within a territory

Gibraltar is small, but Catalan Bay has always felt like a place apart. Hemmed in by the rock face on one side and the sea on the other, the village developed its own rhythm, its own families and, for a long stretch of history, its own language. While the town across the Rock grew cosmopolitan and crowded, La Caleta stayed a fishing settlement of a few dozen households who knew one another by name and by trade.

That separateness was not only geographic. It was also practical. The eastern side was harder to reach, harder to defend and, for most of the colonial period, of little interest to the garrison except as a source of fish. The people who lived there were left, more or less, to themselves. The result was a community that kept its character long after the rest of Gibraltar had blended into the mixed identity the territory is known for today.

After 1704, and the number that gets misquoted

When an Anglo-Dutch force captured Gibraltar in August 1704, during the War of the Spanish Succession, almost the entire Spanish population left. Into the emptied town came traders, labourers and fishermen from around the Mediterranean. Among those who remained and settled were around 30 Genoese families, many of whom formed the core of the community at Catalan Bay and worked the waters off the eastern shore, as the history of the Genoese in Gibraltar records.

Here is where most accounts, including an earlier version of this page, go wrong. You will often read that a census of 1725 counted 414 Genoese in a civilian population of 1,113. The figures are real, but 1725 was not a census. The Gibraltar National Archives is explicit that the early 18th century produced a series of lists drawn up for particular purposes, and that the 1725 one recorded the number of able-bodied men capable of bearing arms. It counted fighting-age men, not women, not children, not the whole village. The earliest census of the whole civilian population to survive is that of 1753.

The two 1753 rows are not a misprint. Gibraltar's own sources disagree about the detail. The National Archives account gives British 414, Genoese 597, Jews 572, Spaniards 185 and Portuguese 25, which adds to the 1,793 it states. The Government of Gibraltar's census history page lists the same Genoese total but puts the British at 434 and the Jews at 575, which adds to 1,816. Other published accounts give the British as low as 351.

We cannot tell you which is right, and anyone who states one of them flatly is guessing. What every version agrees on is the part that matters: 597 Genoese, the largest single civilian group in Gibraltar in 1753, close to a third of everyone living there. Liguria helped build this place.

The language that lived on the eastern shore

What makes Catalan Bay genuinely unusual is not just that Genoese families settled there, but how long their language lasted. Italian faded from official use in the town during the early 19th century. In La Caleta the Genoese dialect carried on as a living tongue.

How long is disputed, and worth being straight about. Some accounts have it dying out in the early decades of the 20th century. Others, resting on interviews with elderly fishermen who still knew Genoese words, push the end to the 1970s. Those are probably measuring different things: fluent everyday speech in the first case, surviving fragments in the second. Either way, a dialect carried here by fishermen in the early 1700s was still being used on this beach more than two hundred years later.

A Ligurian dialect from the days of sailing boats was still spoken in Catalan Bay well into the 20th century, long after Italian had vanished from the rest of Gibraltar.

The Genoese legacy did not disappear when the dialect fell quiet. It lives inside Llanito, the Gibraltarian vernacular that blends Andalusian Spanish and English. Close to 700 Llanito words are borrowed from the Genoese dialect. Around 20% of the population carries a Genoese or Italian surname, a figure the linguist Fiorenzo Toso reached by counting names in Gibraltar's phone listings. Note the distinction, because it is often garbled: that is a share of people, not a share of the surname list. The fishermen of La Caleta are woven into how Gibraltar still speaks.

A life ruled by permits and the sea

For much of the 19th century, you could not simply move to Catalan Bay. Only fishermen were permitted to live in the village, and to do so they needed a fishing permit from the Governor of Gibraltar. Only a limited number were issued, which kept the population small, tightly knit and almost entirely tied to the sea, a restriction set out in the record of Catalan Bay.

That permit system did more than regulate fishing. It preserved the village as a closed community for generations, slowing the inflow of outsiders that reshaped the rest of Gibraltar. It is one reason the dialect and the identity held on so long: the people who lived there were, by rule, the families who had always lived there. Their working lives ran to the rhythm of the catch, hauling boats up the shingle by hand, mending nets in the lee of the houses and selling fish across the Rock in the town markets. The boats were small and open, and a poor season was felt by the whole village at once.

The disputed name: Catalan or Caleta?

The name is a small historical argument that has never been settled. The Spanish name La Caleta, meaning a small bay or cove, is the older one, and it appears in records well before 1704. A Royal Dispatch of 6 March 1634 already names La Caleta alongside La Atunara, the neighbouring settlement across the bay in what is now La Linea.

So where does Catalan Bay come from? One account holds that the bay is named for a group of around 350 Catalan servicemen said to have settled after the Anglo-Dutch capture of 1704, though that rests on tradition rather than firm record. A more sceptical theory says Catalan is simply an English mishearing of Caleta. Adding to the puzzle, military orders from the siege of 1727 call the spot the Genoese Cove, which tells you what the British thought they were looking at: whatever the name on the map, the people in the boats were Ligurian.

The honest answer is that the origin of the English name is uncertain, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. What is not in doubt is who fished these waters.

The war that emptied the village

The sharpest break in the village's long continuity came not from the sea but from the wider war. In 1940, with Gibraltar needed as a fortress, the British government evacuated most of the civilian population, the caleteños among them. Families who had lived within sight of the same stretch of beach for generations were shipped to Britain, Madeira, Jamaica and French Morocco, and many would not see the Rock again for years.

The return was painfully slow. The first repatriation party reached Gibraltar in April 1944, but housing was scarce and the process dragged on. As late as 1947 around 2,000 Gibraltarians were still in camps in Northern Ireland, and the last evacuees did not come home until 1951. For a community whose identity was bound up in staying put, generation after generation in the same houses, an absence that stretched to eleven years for the last of them was a profound shock. That the traditions survived it at all is part of what makes this story remarkable.

The village you can visit today

Modern Catalan Bay is compact and easy to take in on foot. The tall houses press together along a narrow strip of land, the Catholic church of Our Lady of Sorrows sits at the heart of the old village, and the beach curls below the cliffs of the eastern face. VisitGibraltar lists it among the territory's main beaches, and several restaurants along the front specialise in fresh seafood, which feels right in a place built by fishermen. Our food and drink guide sets out what else to look for on a Gibraltar table.

Look south along the shore and you see the great sand slope that defines this coast, running down the eastern cliffs above neighbouring Sandy Bay. It is worth knowing what you are actually looking at, because the usual description is wrong. That slope was not a natural catchment. From 1903 the city engineer had it smoothed, piled with creosoted timber and sheeted over with corrugated galvanised iron to harvest rainwater for the colony. The structure grew from about 10 acres to a maximum of 34 acres by 1961. Dismantling began in 2001, and by 2006 the slope had been returned to native vegetation. What stands there now is the restored slope, green again, not the iron sheeting that covered it for most of the 20th century.

The village still keeps its traditions. Each September the statue of Our Lady of Sorrows is carried from the church down to the beach, where the Bishop of Gibraltar blesses the sea. It is the village's main religious festival and a direct thread back to a community that has marked its calendar by the water for centuries. The feast of Our Lady of Sorrows falls on 15 September, and several listings give that as the date, but the parish and the heritage record both say only September, so check locally before planning a trip around it.

How to make the most of the eastern side

Catalan Bay rewards anyone willing to leave the town behind. The eastern side is quieter, more residential and far less photographed than the western waterfront, which is the point of coming. Getting here is easy: the village sits on the eastern coast road, a short drive or bus ride from the town centre, and once you arrive everything worth seeing is within a few minutes on foot. The beach is at its best in the warmer months, so timing matters, and our month by month guide sets out when to come.

One practical warning. The cable car is closed for reconstruction until 2027, so if you are pairing a morning at La Caleta with the heights above, plan on driving, taking a tour vehicle or walking up. The tunnels, the viewpoints and the Barbary macaques are all still open. For the bigger picture of the Rock that looms over the village, see our Rock of Gibraltar guide.

Why the caleteños still matter

Catalan Bay is a reminder that Gibraltar's identity was never a single thing. It was assembled, family by family, from Genoa and Andalusia, from Britain and Portugal, from Jewish, Maltese and many other communities. The caleteños are one of the clearest surviving threads of that weave: a fishing people who carried a Ligurian dialect across three centuries, survived a wartime exile and left their words inside the way Gibraltar still talks. Stand on the shingle, look up at the painted houses, and you are not at a pretty cove by accident. You are in a village that kept its own language against every odd, for longer than almost anyone realises.

Stay in Gibraltar and explore Catalan Bay

Catalan Bay is best discovered slowly: a long lunch of grilled fish on the seafront, an afternoon swim beneath the cliffs, a wander past the painted houses where a Genoese tongue once carried on the breeze. Victory Suites puts all of it within easy reach. We sit on Devils Tower Road, about a ten minute walk from Grand Casemates Square and only minutes from Gibraltar International Airport, which makes the eastern beaches an easy outing rather than a day-long expedition. Settle into one of more than 100 serviced apartments with full kitchens, so you can cook whatever the morning's catch inspires. There is an indoor pool and a gym on site, and our team can point you to the best seafood tables in La Caleta and the quietest hour to have the beach to yourself.