Spain closed the consulate it had kept in Gibraltar since 1716 on 30 April 1954. Queen Elizabeth II did not arrive until 10 May. The retaliation came ten days before the visit it was retaliating against, and almost every retelling puts it the other way round. That sequence matters, because it tells you the protest was never about what the Queen did on the Rock. It was about the fact that she was coming at all. The closure is recorded in the British parliamentary record. A [written answer of 3 May 1954](https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/written-answers/1954/may/03/gibraltar-spanish-consulate) states that the Spanish Consul General informed the Government of Gibraltar officially on 17 April that the Spanish Consulate at Gibraltar would be closed on 30 April for an indefinite period. Read the dates in order. Spain gave notice on 17 April, shut the doors on 30 April, and the Royal Yacht entered the bay on 10 May. The decision itself was taken by the Spanish Council of Ministers on 9 April, a month before the Queen set foot on the Rock. The consulate had been there since 1716, through 59 consuls and two and a half centuries of wars, sieges and treaties. It did not survive the announcement of a royal visit. |Date in 1954|What happened| |9 April|Spanish Council of Ministers decides to close the consulate| |17 April|Spanish Consul General gives formal notice to Gibraltar| |30 April|The consulate closes for an indefinite period| |1 May|The Queen and the Duke board Britannia at Tobruk| |3 to 7 May|The royal party is in Malta| |10 May|The Royal Yacht enters the Bay of Gibraltar at 9am| |11 May|Second day of the visit, then departure| |15 May|The Queen arrives back in London| The [Gibraltar Chronicle's account of the visit](https://www.chronicle.gi/70-years-since-queen-elizabeth-iis-1954-visit-to-gibraltar/) records a schedule that would exhaust a modern royal tour. Ten ceremonies in thirteen hours. She began within about fifteen minutes of landing, opening and renaming Reclamation Road as Queensway. Then a review of 3,000 Combined Services personnel watched by some 15,000 spectators, with a 21 gun Royal Salute and three cheers from men who had taken their hats off. After that the City Council Waterworks, the Convent, the Assembly Rooms, the Eliott Memorial and Victoria Stadium, where she presented the Queen Elizabeth Cup. Tea at the Royal Gibraltar Yacht Club. Dinner at the Convent. The second day was the Upper Rock, then the laying of the foundation stone of the King George VI Hospital with a silver trowel, where she declared the stone well and truly laid, and then Catalan Bay. The hospital that stone was laid for is gone now, which is its own comment on how long seventy years is. The Chronicle's line from the day is the one worth keeping: from every home a flag, from every street and lane a cheer. > A territory of that size turning out 15,000 people for a military review is not a crowd. It is close to the entire population standing in one place. For scale, Gibraltar's population at the 2022 census was 37,936. The 1954 figure of roughly 15,000 spectators at a single parade, in a smaller postwar population, is the kind of turnout no modern event here comes near. This was a garrison town watching 3,000 servicemen drill for a monarch two years into her reign. Here is where the retellings fall apart, and it is worth fixing because it is repeated everywhere including in otherwise careful local reporting. The Queen is usually described as 27 at the time of the visit. She was 28. She was born on 21 April 1926, and her birthday had passed nineteen days before she landed. Prince Charles is usually given as four. He was five, born on 14 November 1948. Princess Anne, born 15 August 1950, was three, and that one is normally right. |Person|Born|Age on 10 May 1954|Commonly printed as| |Queen Elizabeth II|21 April 1926|28|27| |Prince Charles|14 November 1948|5|4| |Princess Anne|15 August 1950|3|3| None of this changes the history. It is here because a site that cannot get an arithmetic check right has no business asking you to trust it on the treaty. The ship matters to the story. [Britannia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMY_Britannia) was launched on 16 April 1953 and commissioned on 11 January 1954, and her maiden voyage left Portsmouth on 14 April 1954, reaching Malta on 22 April. She was carrying Charles and Anne. Their parents had been away on the Commonwealth tour for months, and the family was reunited when the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh boarded at Tobruk on 1 May 1954. Malta followed from 3 to 7 May, then Gibraltar on 10 May, then home to London on 15 May. So the Rock was the final port of call of both the Commonwealth tour and the new Royal Yacht's first voyage. Spain was protesting about a stop that was, in itinerary terms, the last leg home. The consulate was the first of a sequence rather than a one off gesture. Franco followed it with restrictions on the frontier, including a decision to stop issuing new