We tell you the legends. We also tell you they are legends.
Every claim on every walk carries a mark and a source. A professor will read this, and the Government has to be able to defend it. Saying “archaeologists are still arguing about this” is more interesting than false certainty anyway.
Heard at the WWII tunnels, on Lord Airey's ridge
Six men volunteered to be bricked in alive.
In 1941, if Gibraltar fell, Operation Tracer was to seal a leader, two doctors and three wireless operators inside a chamber cut into the Rock: with stores for seven years and two observation slits two centimetres wide to watch German shipping through. Ian Fleming was in the planning. It was never activated, and the entrance was lost until cavers found it again in December 1996.
Established
Sourced and not seriously disputed. If a specialist reads this, they will recognise it.
Heard at the Skywalk, with the water underneath you
The Mediterranean dried out, and refilled through the gap below.
Between roughly 5.96 and 5.33 million years ago the Strait closed and the entire Mediterranean evaporated into a salt desert hundreds of metres below the Atlantic. Then it opened. A 2009 study in Nature modelled up to 90% of the refill pouring through in under two years. That it happened is not in doubt; the two-year figure is a model, and other groups argue for far longer.
Still argued
Real evidence on more than one side. We have given you the version most researchers hold, and flagged that it is not settled.
Heard at St Michael's Cave, in the main chamber
The cave has no bottom, and a tunnel runs under the sea to Africa.
That is how the monkeys got here, the story goes. Victorian visitors believed it enough to lower men on ropes looking for the way through. The genetics say otherwise: every Gibraltar macaque haplotype also occurs in North Africa and there are no post-glacial fossils on the Rock, so people almost certainly carried them across. We tell you the story anyway. It is a good one.
Told, not proven
A story people tell about this place. Worth hearing, worth repeating, and not evidence of anything.
The three marks
Established
Sourced and not seriously disputed. If a specialist reads this, they will recognise it.
Still argued
Real evidence on more than one side. We have given you the version most researchers hold, and flagged that it is not settled.
Told, not proven
A story people tell about this place. Worth hearing, worth repeating, and not evidence of anything.
On the walk the mark sits next to the claim, with its sources under it. Tapping the mark explains the scheme in place, so nobody has to have read this page.
Checked by the people who look after this rock.
GONHS
Gibraltar Ornithological & Natural History Society
Natural history, the macaque census, and the migration counts kept at the observatory here since 1964.
The Gibraltar Heritage Trust
Heritage and archaeology
The tunnels, the sieges, the caves and the Neanderthal material: including where the record stops and the argument begins.
Department of the Environment
Government of Gibraltar
Publishes Compass, runs the reserve and the gates, and posts the closures and heat warnings you see on a route before you set off.
Drawn for this rock
Ink line over watercolour wash, one hand, one paper, drawn for these walks and not bought in. A photograph of a tunnel in the dark tells you nothing, and a drawing can leave out what does not matter. The plates are the walk, so they appear at the stops rather than in a gallery.