Day 236 Mar 28 2015 Manilva Spain

Pillars of Hercules

view from inside the siege tunnels

one of the siege tunnels

Moorish Castle 

3 country picture with Gibraltar, Morocco and Spain from top of castle 

the monkey ran over to be in the pic

Day 236  Mar 28  2015  Manilva Spain

We crossed into Gibraltar today and toured the Rock of Gibraltar.  The first stop was St. Michael’s Cave.  There are several legends associated with the cave and the rock.  The first being that the cave is bottomless.  The second that the cave is one end of the Ley tunnel which passes under the Strait of Gibraltar, and that is how the Barbary Macaques arrived in Europe.  The third legend is that the Rock of Gibraltar is one of the legendary Pillars of Hercules.  The second stop of the day was the Great Siege Tunnels which were dug out by the British during the 18^th century for the war against the French and the Spanish.  The tunnels were set up with displays that showed some of the activities that would have gone on in the tunnels.  The third stop of the day was the World War II tunnels.  The tunnels were constructed and provisioned to hold up to 16000 troops.  In all there are 55 km of tunnels in the rock of Gibraltar.  Our last stop of the day was the Moorish Castle that was built in the 8^th century.  It shows the importance of Gibraltar as a defensive position for the past many centuries.  We also saw lots of Macaques and even had one jump through the window of our car.  We were outside the car at an observation point and had left the windows open.  The Macaque jumped in and stole our garbage bag, complete with garbage.  We were fortunate that he did not take Evy’s purse and all our passports.