Greatest wonders of the world, as seen and described by famous writers

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It was with real regret that we left Algeciras and made the short voyage across the bay to Gibraltar, where we instantly found ourselves in a place as unlike Spain as it is possible to imagine. Upon the wharf you are assailed by a clamour of English-speaking porters and boatmen. Passing the gates, you come upon a barrack-yard swarming with tall British soldiers, looking wonderfully bright and handsome, after the insignificant figures and soiled, shabby uniforms of the Spanish army. Hence the Waterport Street opens, the principal thoroughfare of the town, though from its insignificant shops, with English names, and its low public-houses, you have to look up at the strip of bright blue sky above, to be reminded that you are not in an English seaport.

Just outside the principal town, between it and the suburb of Europe, is the truly beautiful Alameda, an immense artificial garden, where endless gravel paths wind through labyrinths of geraniums and coronella and banks of flame-coloured ixia, which are all in their full blaze of beauty under the March sun, though the heat causes them to wither and droop before May. During our stay at Gibraltar, it has never ceased to surprise us that this Alameda, the shadiest and pleasantest place open to the public upon the Rock, should be almost deserted; but so it is. Even when the band playing affords an additional attraction, there are not a dozen persons to listen to it; whereas at Rome on such occasions, the Pincio, exceedingly inferior as a public garden, would be crowded to suffocation, and always presents a lively and animated scene.

One succession of gardens occupies the western base of the Rock, and most luxuriant and gigantic are the flowers that bloom in them. Castor-oil plants, daturas, and daphnes, here attain the dignity of timber, while geraniums and heliotropes many years old, so large as to destroy all the sense of floral proportions which has hitherto existed in your mind. It is a curious characteristic, and typical of Gibraltar, that the mouth of a cannon is frequently found protruding from a thicket of flowers.

The eastern side of the Rock, in great part a perpendicular precipice, is elsewhere left uncultivated, and is wild and striking in the highest degree. Here, beyond the quaint Jewish cemetery of closely set gravestones, bearing Hebrew inscriptions on the open hillside, a rugged path winds through rocks and tangled masses of flowers and palmists, to a curious stalactitic cavern called Martin’s Cave. On this side of the cliff a remnant of the famous “apes of Tarshish” is suffered to remain wild and unmolested, though their numbers, always very small, have lately been reduced by the very ignorant folly of a young officer, who shot one and wounded nine others, for which he has been very properly impounded.

On the northern side of the Rock are the famous galleries tunnelled in the face of the precipice, with cannon pointing towards Spain from their embrasures. Through these, or, better, by delightful paths, fringed with palmettos and asphodel, you may reach El Hacho, the signal station, whence the view is truly magnificent over the sea, and the mountain chains of two continents, and down into the blue abysses beneath the tremendous precipice upon which it is placed.

THE ROCK OF GIBRALTAR.

The greatest drawback to the charms of Gibraltar has seemed to be the difficulty of leaving it. It is a beautiful prison. We came fully intending to ride over the mountain passes by Ronda, but on arriving we heard that the whole of that district was in the hands of the brigands under the famous chief Don Diego, and the Governor positively refused to permit us to go that way. Our lamentations at this have since been cut short by the news of a double murder at the hands of the brigands on the way we wished to have taken, and at the very time we should have taken it. So we must go to Malaga by sea, and wait for the happy combination of a good steamer and calm weather falling on the same day.

Late in the afternoon of the 15th of March we embarked on board the Lisbon in the dockyard of Gibraltar. It had been a lovely day, and the grand Rock had looked its best, its every cleft filled with flowers and foliage. The sun set before we had rounded Europe Point, and the precipitous cliffs of the eastern bay rose utterly black against the yellow sky.

Wanderings in Spain (London, 1873).