A Star Wars hero walked to the edge of a cliff 340 metres above the sea, raised a glowing lightsaber, and sliced a ribbon to open a floor made of glass. That is not a film scene. That is how Gibraltar launched its Skywalk, a transparent platform cantilevered off the eastern flank of the Rock, where the only thing between your shoes and the Strait below is a few centimetres of laminated glass. People still ask the same two questions when they first see it: how on earth is that safe, and how do I make myself step out onto it. The answers are more interesting than you might expect, and they begin with the men who built it and the war that came before. The Skywalk is a glass viewing platform that juts out from the summit ridge of the Rock of Gibraltar, inside the Upper Rock Nature Reserve. You walk out onto transparent panels with nothing visible beneath your feet but a sheer drop and, far below, the open water. On a clear day the view takes in three countries and two continents at once: the Spanish coast curling away to the north, the mountains of Morocco rising across the Strait, the Atlantic to the west and the Mediterranean to the east, all meeting at the narrow gateway that gives Gibraltar its strategic fame. It is, in the most literal sense, a walk on the edge. The platform sits where the Rock falls away most steeply, so the feeling is less like standing on a balcony and more like floating off the cliff face. Even seasoned hikers tend to take that first step gingerly, then grin, then refuse to leave. Yes. The Skywalk stands 340 metres directly above sea level, which puts it higher than the very top of The Shard in London. It is a fair comparison and a useful one, because it gives the height a shape you can picture: you are standing at roughly the level of western Europe's tallest building, except instead of a steel tower wrapped around you there is only open air and a thin floor of glass. That altitude is what turns the Skywalk from merely scenic into genuinely vertiginous. The ground does not slope away gently beneath you. It drops, fast and far, and your stomach knows it before your eyes have finished arguing. This is the first question almost everyone asks, and the engineering answer is firmly reassuring. The floor and balustrade are built from four layers of laminated glass, around 4.2 centimetres thick in total, set into forty-two panels. The platform is rated to carry roughly 350 people at once, far more than could ever realistically crowd onto it, and each panel is designed to bear a substantial load on its own. Beneath the glass sits a serious piece of modern engineering. The main steel frame was made in eighteen separate sections weighing a combined total of more than 30,000 kilograms, each piece small enough to be hauled up the narrow road and bolted together on site. The cantilevered structure is pinned back into the mountain with rock anchors, each one holding a tensile load of about 15 tonnes, and a panoramic lift built into the cliff helps anchor the whole assembly to the terrain. The 2.5 metre wide walkway designed by Arc Designs was engineered to shrug off the fierce gusts that funnel over the ridge, winds that can exceed 150 kilometres per hour. In short: your nerves may wobble, but the structure will not. > Forty-two panels, four layers of glass, eighteen tonnes of steel bolted into the mountain, and anchors each rated to hold fifteen tonnes. The Skywalk was built to be terrifying to stand on and impossible to fall through. The Skywalk opened on 21 March 2018, and Gibraltar gave it a send-off that no ordinary viewpoint could match. The ribbon was cut not with scissors but with a lightsaber, wielded by Mark Hamill, the actor who played Luke Skywalker. Flanked by Boogie Storm, the dance troupe known for performing in full Stormtrooper costume, and watched by the Chief Minister and the Governor, Hamill declared the platform open with the words: "May the Force be with the Skywalk." The press shortened it to a headline that has stuck ever since, "The Force is strong with the Skywalk," and the image of Luke Skywalker poised on a sheet of glass above the Rock raced around the world. It was a stroke of theatre that suited the place perfectly. A glass walkway hanging off the edge of a famous fortress, opened by a hero from a galaxy far, far away with a glowing blade. The stunt drew headlines well beyond Gibraltar and handed the attraction an origin story most viewpoints can only dream of. The Skywalk did not appear out of nowhere. It was raised on top of an existing military lookout that dates to the Second World War, when the position served as a base for anti-aircraft guns defending the Rock from the air. The summit ridge has been used for military advantage for centuries, commanding a view of the sea approaches that no enemy ship could cross unseen. That heritage runs the length of the ridge. A short walk away sits O'Hara's Battery, perched even higher near the summit, home to a huge gun and n