Our first visit was on the homeward leg of our inaugural 'big trip' in March 2015. It was prompted by curiosity more than anything; we were passing, so why not? The Rock itself is spectacular, as is the view across the straights. The town we found somewhat underwhelming, a post imperial relic, a patch of British tawdriness marooned in sunny Spain. We bought a few things in M&S and Morrisons and decided we probably wouldn't come back.
But we did, in November 2018. This time we took the cable car to the top of the rock. Previously we had walked halfway up as far as Devil's Gap Battery, reluctant to pay €23 euros each to use the cable car. For the first five years of our wanderings, before we qualified for our state pension, we had to budget very carefully to afford to travel for months on end. This time we splashed the cash and actually met the famed 'Barbary Apes'. One of them was so pleased to see Gill he jumped onto her shoulders. So, second visit, we'd done the touristy stuff, 'That's it!' we decided, no point coming back...
But here we are!.
I blame Professor Alice Roberts. I'm uncertain if it was in her excellent TV. series,'The Incredible Human Journey' or one of her other programmes where she showcased the Neanderthal remains and artefacts discovered in Gorham's Cave in Gibraltar. Anyway, it fuelled my growing curiosity about our origins and I decided I wanted to see the bone fragments and tools found in the cave, now housed in Gibraltar's museum.
We arrived on a Sunday. The museum was closed, but the Eroski supermarket just over the border in Gibraltar was open. We needed a few things so passports at the ready we headed off. It's less than a kilometre from the area autocaravanas to the frontier but it's quite easy to get a bit lost on the maze of footpaths that weave through security fenced car parks on the Spanish side of the border. What should have been a 15 minute stroll became a half hour hike.
When we reached the frontier what used to be a fairly understated affair consisting of an elderly Spanish portacabin followed by a similarly venerable British one had developed into something that resembled Checkpoint Charlie. The border was now guarded by four metre high heavy gauge wire fences that bristled with all sorts of high- tech security kit, the upgraded Spanish facilities included a dozen or so electronic automatic gates with facial recognition, like you get in an airport. I imagine they have been installed in preparation for the roll-out of Etias next October.
We crossed the border straightaway - on a Sunday it's quiet; on weekdays over 14,O00 people living in Spain cross the border to work in Gibraltar. Our plan was to have a coffee in the Ocean Village waterfront redevelopment, a leisure area close to the border. First you have to cross the airport runway. The gates closed just as we walked up to them. A ten minute wait ensued as we watched a British Airways plane slowly trundle down to the end of the runway, rev its engines to screaming pitch then take off, climbing swiftly, a small dot by the time the red bod went green and a border guard opened the gate to let us through..
Ocean Village is instant Britain. Chesterton's, the Gibraltar based Estate Agency,' describes the waterside development as a 'vibrant recreational gem set between two attractive marinas'. It's clearly meant to be a bit swanky but like many similar developments back in the UK it misses the mark and ends up bland, soul-less and somewhat tawdry. Ocean Village has a casino, upmarket apartment blocks and a hi-rise business centre aimed at offshore companies.
However any ambition to emulate Monaco is somewhat derailed by the clutch of second-rate British restaurant chains clustered around the waterfront, all the usual suspects - Wagamamas, Las Iguanas, Pizza Express. We'd spied an independent café online called Café Fresco, it was well reviewed, but when we arrived it was almost empty, in fairness most of the restaurants in Ocean Village seemed very quiet - odd considering it was mid-afternoon on a sunny Sunday. A kilometre away across the harbour I had no doubt that the restaurants in La Linea would be heaving and very voluble. A big loud family Sunday lunch out is an institution across Spain. Not apparently in Gibraltar.
Café Fresco wasn't terrible, on the barely acceptable side of average I guess. A good example of a very British thing - it was 'not bad'.
On the way back to the van we called into Eroski - a Basque Country supermarket chain that has expanded across Spain. The Gibraltar branch is unique in that it has partnered with Waitrose. We took the opportunity to restock on some of life's essentials, namely Wensleydale cheese and Carr's Water biscuits. Was the 5km trek there and back worth the effort. I suppose it all comes down to how much you like Wensleydale cheese. Actually, I like it a lot.
Next day - Google maps reckoned it was a 3.1km walk from the area autocaravnas in La Linea to Gibraltar museum - 41 minutes it predicted. What the app couldn't foresee was the 15 minute queue at passport control on weekdays and our capacity to get lost in the tangle of streets Gibraltar old town.
The main shopping street is ok, reminiscent of the high street of a medium sized market town in the Midlands, like Macclesfield or Droitwich Spa. A familiar mix of hopeful regeneration, mundanity and gentle decay.
As you might expect, Gibraltar is built on a steep slope, a series of streets running in a parallel along contour lines with steep interconnecting alleys. We got lost, unable to work out if the main street was above us or below us. The road we ended up on lacked a proper pavement. Gibraltar is traffic choked and the drivers aggressive. It was horrible.
Google maps and sat navs in general can't cope with sudden changes in altitude. Muriel, as we call our somewhat venerable Tom Tom sat-nav, once tried to direct us off a cliff edge on a mountain pass near Interlaken because she failed to register the changing heights as the road doubled back on itself in a series of hairpin bends. Google maps became similarly bewildered by Gibraltar's vertiginous street plan. More by accident than design we found Marks and Spencers (perhaps British people have a sixth sense about this, like homing pigeons) from there it was easy to find the museum.
Was it worth the effort? It's a moot question. I did want to see the artefacts from Gorham's Cave and they did not disappoint. As for the museum itself, it reminded me of the one in a short story by Dylan Thomas where he describes the town museum - Swansea's presumably - as "a museum that should be in a museum".
It's not possible to illustrate this point as photography is strictly prohibited in the place. Why this should be is beyond me as there is very little on display interesting enough to want to photograph things in the first place.
The few items of significance, such as the Neanderthal skull fragments and stone tools from their time are displayed in traditional glass cases, dated and identified but with no attempt to give the context or to tell their story. Most of the rest of the exhibits relate to British Imperial history - lots of models of sailing ships and old maps, but presented in a very dull way. Then there is a gallery of bad watercolours of Gibraltar mainly painted by a couple of British Army officers who fancied themselves as amateur artists.
The museum itself occupies an old house with lots of small rooms and narrow corridors, it's somewhat claustrophobic. The complex includes the remains of an Arabic bathhouse, which is interesting but there is nothing much left of the original - certainly none of the decorative tiles from the period.
So, overall the place is underwhelming, with one exception. The first exhibit that confronts you is startling and thought provoking in equal measure. Immediately to the left of the pay desk is a small darkened room occupied by full sized effigy of a Neanderthal woman with a small boy clinging to her right leg. They both look a little startled, as well they might, when confronted by the sudden appearance ofa couple of distant cousins from 42,000 years in the future.
The pair are depicted unclothed, which could have been the case since the animal bone fragments in Gorham's Cave reveal the climate 42,000 years ago was typical of a warm savannah with an average annual temperature of about 14 degrees Celsius. The difficulty here is that this presents the pair stereotypically as 'naked savages' reinforcing the notion that Neanderthals were some kind of brutish sub-species of human. Developments in genetics earlier this century have called all of this into question. It looks increasingly likely that Neanderthals were simply a slightly different version of us.
Swedish Geneticist Svante Pääbo sequenced the Neanderthal genome winning a Nobel prize for his efforts in 2022. His work also established that there had been considerable interbreeding between Neanderthal and Homo Sapiens when the latter spread from Western Asia into Europe between 65, 000 - 47,000 years ago. Many Europeans as well as Eurasian people from the steppes have traces of Neanderthal ancestry. In my case about 2.4% according to a report on my genetic profile from 23andme.
Developments in anthropology mirrors genetics discovering ever more similarities between early human and Neanderthal cultures. The stone tools of Neanderthals are similar to those of early human; they both used fire for cookery; they both buried their dead; bone needles found in Neanderthal sites indicate they sewed hides and furs to make garments and shelters. Abstract scratching on the walls of Gorham's cave hints at 'symbolic thinking'. The Neanderthal diet was varied - the ones in Gibraltar were very fond of rabbit it seems from the remains. However bones of larger creatures such as ibex have also been found. The hunters used long lances rather than throwing spears, this would take considerable organisational skills among a group of huntersto trap and kill such agile prey. It seems to me that team work like this presupposes some kind of language - either signed, spoken or a mixture of the two.
All of this calls into question how the woman and boy in the museum are represented. There is an inherent contradiction in her pose. Why, if the cultural norm was to be unclothed, is the Neanderthal women shown crossing her arms in front of her in a failed attempt to protect her modesty? It doesn't make sense. It communicates vulnerability rather than agency. Yet Neanderthal culture persisted for around 350,000 years, longer in fact than our particular variant of being human has lasted so far. So would it not be better to present the Neanderthals as doing something - skinning a rabbit using one of their stone butchery tools or sewing up a buckskin tunic?
So was the trip to Gibraltar to visit our cousins worthwhile? I am not sure, the museum was disappointing, however the place's deficiencies raised interesting questions which in turn sent forced me into a Google-fest beginning with Wikipedia, which then pointed me in the direction of various academic articles about Neanderthal culture. If the museum had been informative I might have been satisfied by their explanation and not been prompted to do further reading myself.
Gill found a nearby place on the main street for lunch. 'Latinos' had positive reviews but that was not our experience. Gill's eggs Benedict she judged as almost mediocre, my cheese toastie failed to reach such heady heights.
We had our now habitual post Gibraltar conversation, that we probably wouldn't be back. Of course that's exactly what we agreed after our previous two visits.... so, you never know.
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