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The Summit Ridge

The high south end: Africa in front of you, both seas at once, and the 426 m top.

On foot
2 h
Distance
2.9 km
Effort
Moderate · steps
Stops
8
Start walking

Works with no signal

4 MBabout a minute on 4G

Before you set off

  • Two litres each in summer. The only water inside the reserve is at St Michael's Cabin, and it is not on every walk.

  • The gates shut at 19:00 in summer and 18:00 in winter, and no path is lit. Work backwards from closing time.

  • Feeding a macaque is illegal and carries fines up to £4,000. Keep food out of sight and bags closed.

Two-page notebook panorama of the Rock of Gibraltar from the west: the sheer north face on the left, the summit ridge running south and dropping to the low tail at Europa Point, the town along the shoreline, sailing boats in the bay and the Spanish coast as a pale band on the right. A walking route is drawn over it as a dotted ink line with numbered stops, listed in order underneath.
  1. 1Cable Car Top Station
  2. 2Signal Hill
  3. 6St Michael's Cave

The shape of it

41 m up, 246 m down

The walk

The southern fork, and the one you walk for the view. From the Top Station the ridge runs south over Signal Hill and Douglas Path to the highest ground in Gibraltar at 426 metres, then drops off the back to St Michael's Cave and down to Jews' Gate. 2.9 km and mostly downhill, about two hours with the cave. Two honest warnings. Douglas Path has a cliff on one side and no railing, and this whole ridge is where the Levanter cloud sits: when the Rock is wearing a cap of cloud, visibility here can go from kilometres to metres in a few minutes. Do not start it in that. It ends at Jews' Gate, where the walk to Europa Point begins.

What you will actually see

eight stops. The six with drawings are worth stopping properly for. The rest are a minute of narration and a reason to look up.

  1. Ink and wash plate of the cable car top station on the summit ridge: a low modern building of concrete and glass sitting astride the crest with a railed viewing terrace, a cabin arriving on its cables, two macaques on the parapet, and the town and the bay far below to the west.
    1

    Cable Car Top Station

    385 m approx.

    Africa is fourteen kilometres away and visible; the macaques behind you can open a rucksack in four seconds. Both are true on the same terrace.

  2. 2

    Signal Hill / Signal Station

    387 m · can be skipped

    Two centuries of watching the Strait and reporting every ship by flag, before there was any other way.

  3. 3

    Douglas Path (south end)

    400 m approx.

    Where the Rock makes its own cloud, above a fossil sand dune stranded on the east face.

  4. Ink and wash plate of Lord Airey's Battery near the southern summit: a nine point two inch gun on a low circular mounting in a shallow open concrete emplacement, repainted rather than rusted, with an access hatch beside it and a spare gun barrel lying on wooden blocks on the verge below.
    4

    Lord Airey's Battery

    400 m

    Where the Mediterranean Steps let you out, at 400 metres, with a sea on either side of you.

  5. Ink and wash plate of O'Hara's Battery at the summit: a long naval gun on a rusted circular mounting, its barrel out over the sea, set in a concrete emplacement among limestone and scrub.
    5

    O'Hara's Battery

    426 m

    The highest ground in Gibraltar, where a governor built a tower to watch a fleet he could never see.

  6. Wash drawing of the main chamber of St Michael's Cave, its stalactite curtains hanging out of a dark roof onto a floor of fallen limestone blocks, with a single small figure at the left edge for scale.
    6

    St Michael's Cave + Cabin

    300 m approx.

    The largest of more than a hundred caves in the Rock, with fossils sitting in the walls exactly where they died 200 million years ago.

  7. Ink and wash plate of the foot of the Mediterranean Steps at Jews' Gate: a flight of rough uneven limestone steps starting at a gap in a low drystone wall and climbing away into thick wild olive and lentisc, with a bare crag above, a plain metal gate at the bottom, and the sea beyond to the south.
    7

    Mediterranean Steps Trailhead

    185 m approx.

    The hardest walk in Gibraltar starts here, and the rule is that you only ever go up it.

  8. Ink and wash plate of two weathered classical columns standing in coastal scrub above a grey sea: the Pillars of Hercules, with the horizon behind them empty.
    8

    Jews' Gate / Pillars of Hercules

    180 m

    The edge of the classical world, above the gap the Atlantic came back through in what may be the largest flood in the planet's history.

Where it leaves you

This walk finishes at Jews' Gate / Pillars of Hercules.

You can carry straight on from there:

All walksHow we mark what is certain, and what is not