People arrive in Gibraltar expecting a small piece of Britain that drifted south and got stuck to Spain. Fish and chips, red post boxes, a big rock. All of that is here. What catches them out is everything else, because this is one of the strangest six and a half square kilometres on the planet, and almost none of what makes it strange is what the brochures lead with. Here is what Gibraltar actually has that nowhere else does. Gibraltar is **6.7 square kilometres** and home to **37,936 people** at the 2022 census. You can walk from the Spanish frontier to Europa Point at the southern tip in about an hour and a half, and in doing so you will cross the entire territory, pass an international airport, a nature reserve, a working port, a marina, a mosque, a synagogue and several centuries of fortification. That density is the point. Most places make you choose between a city and a landscape. Here they are stacked on top of each other, and the 426 metre limestone ridge that fills every photograph is not scenery you drive out to see. It is at the end of the street. The Barbary macaques on the Upper Rock are the **only wild monkey population in the whole of Europe**. Not a zoo, not an enclosure, not a reintroduction project in a fenced valley. Around three hundred of them live on the Rock, and they wander through the nature reserve, along the roads and occasionally into the town. Nobody is certain how they got here. The species is North African, and the honest answer is that they were probably brought over at some point during the many centuries of Moorish and later British occupation, then simply stayed. Our [guide to the Barbary macaques](/blog/gibraltar-monkeys-barbary-macaques-guide) covers where to find them and, more importantly, how to behave around them, because they are wild animals and they are quick. This is the fact that most visitors do not believe until they are standing inside it. There are more than **fifty kilometres of tunnel** cut into the Rock of Gibraltar, which is a greater length than all of Gibraltar's public roads combined. The mountain has been quietly excavated for two and a half centuries. It began during the Great Siege of 1779 to 1783, when a sergeant major called Ince proposed driving a gallery through the limestone to reach a position the guns could not otherwise cover, and it continued through the Second World War, when the Rock was turned into a fortress capable of hiding an entire garrison underground. Our story of [the Cornish miner who tunnelled the Rock](/blog/great-siege-tunnels-sergeant-major-ince-gibraltar) is the one to read first, and if you want the properly strange version, six men were once sealed inside the Rock on purpose in [Operation Tracer](/blog/operation-tracer-stay-behind-cave-gibraltar). On a clear day the Rif mountains of Morocco sit on the horizon, close enough to pick out individual hillsides. Africa is fourteen kilometres away across the Strait, and from Europa Point you are looking at two continents and two bodies of water, the Atlantic on one side and the Mediterranean on the other, from a single spot. The ancients called this the Pillars of Hercules, the end of the known world, and there is a decent case that the [dollar sign came from those two columns](/blog/dollar-sign-pillars-of-hercules-gibraltar). Whether or not you buy that, standing at the southern tip and watching cargo ships thread the Strait while Africa sits there in the haze is the moment most visitors remember. Gibraltar has the strongest claim of anywhere to being the last place Neanderthals lived. The caves on the eastern face, protected as a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2016, held them until roughly 32,000 years ago, long after they had vanished from the rest of Europe. Inside Gorham's Cave one of them cut a deliberate crosshatch into the rock, and [that engraving](/blog/gorhams-cave-neanderthal-hashtag-engraving) is now among the oldest known abstract designs made by a human hand that was not ours. The other half of the story is better still, and Gibraltar barely gets credit for it. In **1848**, a blast at Forbes Quarry on the north face loosened a near complete adult skull. It was handed to a local scientific society and filed away. It was the first adult Neanderthal skull ever found, and it sat in a cupboard while, eight years later, a limestone valley in Germany produced its own bones and gave the species its name. Had anyone in Gibraltar realised what they were holding, we might be calling them Calpicans, after Calpe, the ancient name for the Rock. The full account is in [the Gibraltar skull history forgot](/blog/gibraltar-neanderthal-skull-forbes-quarry). > Gibraltar found the first one, then spent eight years not knowing. Listen to two Gibraltarians talking and you will hear English, then Andalusian Spanish, then English again, often inside the same sentence. This is **Llanito**, and it is not simply code switching. It has its own vocabulary, drawn from Genoese, Hebrew, Malte