A bronze man in a flat cap stands on a plinth in La Linea, pushing a bicycle towards Gibraltar. He has been doing it since 2003. What almost nobody who walks past him knows is that the bicycle is the point: in January 1966 Spain banned its own workers from crossing the frontier on bicycles and motorbikes, and the bicycle cast in that bronze is the machine the state had taken away. The Monumento al Trabajador Transfronterizo, the Monument to the Cross Border Worker, sits in a small patch of grass on the approach to the frontier, facing the Rock. It is roughly five minutes on foot from the border gate, and about twenty from Gibraltar's Main Street. It is free, it is outdoors, and it takes ninety seconds to look at. It also commemorates the single largest economic catastrophe in this corner of Spain, and the story is almost never told on the Gibraltar side of the line. The work is by Nacho Falgueras, a sculptor whose pieces are scattered across the Campo de Gibraltar, and it dates from 2003. It is a life sized bronze figure of a working man in a flat cap and work clothes, standing beside a bicycle loaded with a pannier bag, on a stone plinth. He faces Gibraltar. The dedication on the front is to the Spanish workers in Gibraltar. Three details are worth a second look. The bicycle, for the reason above. The pannier, because a man crossing for a twelve hour shift carried his own food. And the direction he faces, which is the direction people in this town have faced for work for well over a century. Every 1 May there is a floral tribute at the base of it. It is organised by ASCTEG, the Asociacion Sociocultural de Trabajadores Espanoles en Gibraltar, and attended by the town hall, including the mayor Juan Franco. It is not a tourist event. It is a workers' memorial, and it is treated like one. La Linea exists because of Gibraltar. The [name itself comes from a Spanish siege line](/blog/la-linea-name-meaning-lines-of-contravallation-history) built across the isthmus in 1731 to blockade the Rock. The town that grew behind that line ended up depending on the thing it was built to contain. By the mid twentieth century the arrangement was enormous and entirely one sided. Gibraltar had the jobs. La Linea had the people. Spanish men worked the dockyard, the Ministry of Defence installations and construction. Spanish women worked as domestic servants, and in the colony's schools and hospitals. The Museo de Ecologia Humana's research on [women from La Linea who worked in Gibraltar](https://museoecologiahumana.org/en/obras/women-from-la-linea-workers-in-gibraltar/) records that of the Spanish women registered as workers in Gibraltar in 1964, 72 percent were single or widowed. For many of them it was the only wage in the household. Then Madrid decided the frontier was a lever. The 1969 closure gets all the attention. It was actually the last step of a campaign that ran for five years, and each step was aimed at the workers rather than at Gibraltar's government. |Date|Measure|Who it hit| |October 1964|Spain begins a programme of restrictions after the United Nations Committee of 24 consensus on Gibraltar|Cross frontier workers first| |January 1966|Spanish workers banned from crossing the frontier on bicycles and motorbikes|Anyone who lived more than a walk from the gate| |August 1966|Around 2,000 Spanish women who commuted daily are stopped from crossing|Domestic, school and hospital staff| |October 1966|The frontier gates close to vehicle traffic|Freight, buses, private cars| |8 June 1969|Franco orders the gate shut completely|Roughly 4,800 Spanish workers lose their jobs| |15 December 1982|Partial reopening to Spanish and Gibraltarian pedestrians|Foot traffic only, and only after 13 years| |5 February 1985|Full reopening to vehicles ahead of Spain joining the European Communities|Everybody| On the number of women stopped in 1966, the sources do not agree. The figure that circulates in British parliamentary material of the period is around 2,000. ASCTEG, campaigning in 2025 for a companion statue to the women workers, puts it above 3,000. Nobody has published a reconciliation of the two, so treat it as between two and three thousand and know that the association representing the workers themselves argues for the higher figure. The Government of Gibraltar's own account of the reopening, published for the [fortieth anniversary in February 2025](https://www.gibraltar.gov.gi/press-releases/40-years-of-the-opening-of-the-border-1985-2025-672025-10564), is blunt about the closure and about why it ended: European integration, not a change of heart. The [chronology of the frontier](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibraltar%E2%80%93Spain_border) confirms the 1982 and 1985 dates. The damage was not symmetrical, and it was not what Madrid intended. Gibraltar adapted. It recruited in Morocco: by the end of 1968 there were at least 1,300 Moroccan workers living on the Rock, and the number more than doubled after June 1969. Gibraltarian wome