As I’m writing this, Gibraltar is changing shape. Up until a few days ago, you could walk into British territory from Spain in minutes, except for the passport queues at border control. Now, the border fence between Spain and Gibraltar, in place since 1908, has been dismantled. A new treaty has brought Gibraltar into Schengen.
It’s a major thing, the dissolving of an international border. The sudden softening of a political line into a space of free movement.
Three years ago, during a trip through Andalusia, I went to Gibraltar for one specific reason: James Joyce.
While I was writing my dissertation on him, I became obsessed with how Gibraltar haunted Ulysses. Joyce had actually never set foot there; he knew Gibraltar through maps, guidebooks and travellers’ stories. Yet in the novel, Gibraltar already feels vivid, sunlit compared to Dublin’s grey, paralytic streets. Through Molly Bloom—born on the Rock, daughter of a British officer and a Spanish woman—Gibraltar represents the Mediterranean world: hybrid, sensual, earthy. In the literary imagination, Gibraltar was already “something else”.
Arriving in Gibraltar three years ago felt disorienting.
I left the car at the McDonald’s in La Línea de la Concepción and walked across the border. Past the checks, the road led straight into town, through slicing winds and the roaring of planes.
In minutes, I was in the UK: English flags everywhere, red phone boxes, carpeted pubs, a Debenhams sitting on the high street. Walls and bastions whispered of sieges and military history. And above everything, the Rock: vertical, physical, impossible to ignore.
In the lush Alameda Gardens, macaques moved freely through the trees, entirely indifferent to borders and flags, caring only for food, sunglasses and backpacks. Walking south, I eventually reached Europa Point, with the lighthouse striped red and white. There, the city abruptly gave way to the Mediterranean, a different kind of border, with the faint outline of Morocco just a few kilometres across the water.
The removal of the fence doesn’t make Gibraltar more Spanish, nor more British. Instead, it makes it more porous. It is a place that doesn’t quite settle, resisting the geopolitical categories assigned to it.
I’m curious to see what it will feel like the next time I cross over, passing not through a checkpoint, but simply walking through an open passage. We can dismantle borders in a few hours, but the ghost of the border zone will stay much longer.