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Up from Town

Casemates to the Top Station on your own legs: 5.8 km and 400 metres of climbing.

On foot
3 h 30 m
Distance
5.79 km
Effort
Hard · steps
Stops
11
Start walking

Works with no signal

7 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. 7Apes' Den
  2. 9St Michael's Cave
  3. 10Skywalk
  4. 11Cable Car Top Station

The shape of it

407 m up, 32 m down

The walk

The cable car is shut until the rebuild finishes, so this is how you get to the top. The first 2 km are flat: Main Street, the Southport Gates, the Trafalgar graves, the Alameda. Then the road turns uphill and stays uphill for 400 metres of climb, and that is the entire difficulty of this walk. Nothing here is technical and nothing is exposed. It is simply a long, steady haul on tarmac with very little shade, and in July it is a serious afternoon. Start early, carry two litres each, and expect three and a half hours including the cave. It ends at the Top Station, where the chain forks: the summit ridge to the south, or the tunnels to the north.

What you will actually see

11 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 Grand Casemates Square: a wide paved square with the long two-storey Casemates barracks across the far side, a row of round-arched openings at its base and shuttered windows above, cafe tables under parasols along the near edge, and the green slope of the Rock rising behind the roofline.
    1

    Grand Casemates Square

    10 m approx.

    A galley house, then a barracks, then a parade ground with a gallows on it. Now: lunch.

  2. 2

    Southport Gates

    20 m approx.

    Three arches of three different ages, cut through a wall built after pirates took the town.

  3. 3

    Trafalgar Cemetery

    22 m approx. · can be skipped

    Almost nobody buried here died at Trafalgar. Yellow fever killed far more than the battle did.

  4. 4

    Grand Parade / Cable Car Base

    20 m approx.

    Where the six-minute ride up used to start. It is shut, so the four hundred metres are yours.

  5. 5

    Alameda Botanic Gardens

    25 m approx. · can be skipped

    The garrison's garden since 1816, and the last flat ground before the road turns uphill.

  6. 6

    Charles V Wall (upper)

    230 m approx.

    A wall running from the sea to the cliffs, built when the town found its defences faced the wrong way.

  7. Ink and wash plate of three Barbary macaques on a drystone wall above the Apes' Den path: an adult grooming another's shoulder while a juvenile sits below, with the gravel track and maquis scrub climbing behind them.
    7

    Apes' Den / Queen's Gate

    200 m approx.

    Europe's only wild monkeys, in matriarchal troops, where a male losing an argument picks up somebody else's baby to end it.

  8. Ink and wash plate of the Windsor Suspension Bridge: a slender cable-stayed footbridge on two masts crossing a deep limestone gorge, with wild olive and yellow-flowered scrub framing the near end.
    8

    Windsor Suspension Bridge

    250 m approx.

    Seventy-one metres of gorge that moves when you walk it, under a September flight path used by 300,000 raptors.

  9. 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.
    9

    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.

  10. Ink drawing of the Skywalk: a glass-floored steel platform cantilevered out from the ridge on lattice bracing, one figure standing at the rail, the bay and the shoreline far below.
    10

    Skywalk / Douglas Lookout

    340 m

    A glass floor with 340 metres under it, looking straight down the channel the whole Mediterranean refilled through.

  11. 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.
    11

    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.

Where it leaves you

This walk finishes at Cable Car Top Station.

You can carry straight on from there:

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