We spent Christmas day parked up at the marina at La Linea with a view of Gibraltar.
We joined a large group of other motorhomers to eat our Christmas lunch in the sunshine.
Before Christmas arrived though we took a walk up the Rock. It was a full days tour. First stop is navigating the Main St of Gibraltar and finding the stairs that start your hike upwards. We managed to take the wrong stairs first, but gave us an interesting view of “away from the tourists eyes” Gibraltar.
As we left the town behind and continued to climb we met various people on route who told us the way… sensibly we ignored them and ended up on a random path that had us scrambling up parts of a less used muddy path.
First stop at the start of the nature park was a visit to the Moorish Castle. Then on up to the great siege tunnels, they are cut all the way through the rock and have holes cut out for guns to point at any enemies trying to take the rock.
We then moved up to the cafe at the top, for views over the other side of the rock, and to see the Barbary maquaques. It’s sad to see the maquaques are ‘trained’ by the local taxi drivers to hop into the cabs and create picture opportunities for tourists.
Dave took a walk on the glass skywalk that hovers off the edge of the rock, avoiding the central section that had a large crack in it, and we had a giggle seeing it was opened by Luke Hamill.
Starting to walk down the rock we stopped off at one of the gun batteries before arriving at St Michael’s Cave – this was the highlight of the day for us. The main cave is an entertainment venue now, but back when it was first discovered peole thought it was a bottomless hole and you can see why, it just keeps going.
This finished off our tour of the Rock’s nature reserve and we went back to the van ready for a leg rest.