Your hosts at Gibraltar – “spoiling” as they always are for the sight of new civilian faces – show themselves determined from the first to make you at home. Private Thomas Atkins on sentry duty grins broad welcome to you from the Mole. The official to whom you have to give account of yourself and your belongings greets you with a pleasant smile, and, while your French or Spanish fellow-traveller is strictly interrogated as to his identity, profession, purpose of visit, &c., your English party is passed easily and promptly in, as men “at home” upon the soil which they are treading. Fortunate is it, if a little bewildering, for the visitor to arrive at midday, for before he has made his way from the landing-place to his hotel he will have seen a sight which has few if any parallels in the world. Gibraltar has its narrow, quiet, sleepy alleys as have all Southern towns; and any one who confined himself to strolling through and along these, and avoiding the main thoroughfare, might never discover the strangely cosmopolitan character of the place. He must walk up Waterport Street at midday in order to see what Gibraltar really is – a conflux of nations, a mart of races, an Exchange for all the multitudinous varieties of the human product. Europe, Asia, and Africa meet and jostle in this singular highway. Tall, stately, slow-pacing Moors from the north-west coast; white-turbaned Turks from the eastern gate of the Mediterranean; thick-lipped, and woolly-headed negroids from the African interior; quick-eyed, gesticulating Levantine Greeks; gabardined Jews, and black-wimpled Jewesses; Spanish smugglers, and Spanish sailors; “rock-scorpions,” and red-coated English soldiers – all these compose, without completing, the motley moving crowd that throngs the main street of Gibraltar in the forenoon, and gathers densest of all in the market near Commercial Square.

It is hardly then as a fortress, but rather as a great entrepôt of traffic, that Gibraltar first presents itself to the newly-landed visitor. He is now too close beneath its frowning batteries and dominating walls of rock to feel their strength and menace so impressive as at a distance; and the flowing tide of many-colored life around him overpowers the senses and the imagination alike. He has to seek the outskirts of the town on either side in order to get the great Rock again, either physically or morally, into proper focus. And even before he sets out to try its height and steepness by the ancient, if unscientific, process of climbing it – nay, before he even proceeds to explore under proper guidance its mighty elements of military strength – he will discover perhaps that sternness is not its only feature. Let him stroll round in the direction of the race-course to the north of the Rock, and across the parade-ground, which lies between the town and the larger area on which the reviews and field-day evolutions take place, and he will not complain of Gibraltar as wanting in the picturesque. The bold cliff, beneath which stands a Spanish café, descends in broken and irregular, but striking, lines to the plain, and it is fringed luxuriantly from stair to stair with the vegetation of the South. Marching and counter-marching under the shadow of this lofty wall, the soldiers show from a little distance like the tin toys of the nursery, and one knows not whether to think most of the physical insignificance of man beside the brute bulk of Nature, or of the moral – or immoral – power which has enabled him to press into his service even the vast Rock which stands there beetling and lowering over him, and to turn the blind giant into a sort of Titanic man-at-arms.

Such reflections as these, however, would probably whet a visitor’s desire to explore the fortifications without delay; and the time for that is not yet. The town and its buildings have first to be inspected; the life of the place, both in its military and – such as there is of it – its civil aspect, must be studied; though this, truth to tell, will not engage even the minutest observer very long. Gibraltar is not famous for its shops, or remarkable, indeed, as a place to buy anything, except tobacco, which, as the Spanish Exchequer knows to its cost (and the Spanish Customs’ officials on the frontier too, it is to be feared, their advantage), is both cheap and good. Business, however, of all descriptions is fairly active, as might be expected, when we recollect that the town is pretty populous for its size, and numbers some 20,000 inhabitants, in addition to its garrison of from 5,000 to 6,000 men. With all its civil activity, however, the visitor is scarcely likely to forget – for any length of time – that he is in a “place of arms.” Not to speak of the shocks communicated to his unaccustomed nerves by morning and evening gun-fire; not to speak of the thrilling fanfare of the bugles, executed as only the bugler of a crack English regiment can execute it, and echoed and re-echoed to and fro, from face to face of the Rock, there is an indefinable air of stern order, of rigid discipline, of authority whose word is law, pervading everything. As the day wears on toward the evening this aspect of things becomes more and more unmistakable; and in the neighborhood of the gates, towards the hour of gun-fire, you may see residents hastening in, and non-residents quickening the steps of their departure, lest the boom of the fatal cannon-clock should confine or exclude them for the night. After the closing of the gates it is still permitted for a few hours to perambulate the streets; but at midnight this privilege also ceases, and no one is allowed out of doors without a night-pass. On the 31st of December a little extra indulgence is allowed. One of the military bands will perhaps parade the main thoroughfare discoursing the sweet strains of “Auld Lang Syne,” and the civil population are allowed to “see the old year out and the new year in.” But a timid and respectful cheer is their sole contribution to the ceremony, and at about 12.15 they are marched off again to bed: such and so vigilant are the precautions against treachery within the walls, or surprise from without. In Gibraltar, undoubtedly, you experience something of the sensations of men who are living in a state of siege, or of those Knights of Branksome who ate and drank in armor, and lay down to rest with corslet laced, and with the buckler for a pillow.

The lions of the town itself, as distinguished from the wonders of its fortifications, are few in number. The Cathedral, the Garrison Library, Government House, the Alameda Gardens, the drive to Europa Point exhaust the list; and there is but one of these which is likely to invite – unless for some special purpose or other – a repetition of the visit. In the Alameda, however, a visitor may spend many a pleasant hour, and – if the peace and beauty of a hillside garden, with the charms of subtropical vegetation in abundance near at hand, and noble views of coast and sea in the distance allure him – he assuredly will. Gibraltar is immensely proud of its promenade, and it has good reason to be so. From the point of view of Nature and of Art the Alameda is an equal success. General Don, who planned and laid it out some three-quarters of a century ago, unquestionably earned a title to the same sort of tribute as was bestowed upon a famous military predecessor, Marshal Wade. Anyone who had “seen” the Alameda “before it was made,” might well have “lifted up his hands and blessed” the gallant officer who had converted “the Red Sands,” as the arid desert once occupying this spot was called, into the paradise of geranium-trees which has taken its place. Its monuments to Elliot and Wellington are not ideal: the mysterious curse pronounced upon English statuary appears to follow it even beyond seas; but the execution of the effigies of these national heroes may, perhaps, be forgotten in the interest attaching to their subjects. The residents at any rate, whether civil or military, are inured to these efforts of the sculptor’s art, and have long since ceased to repine. And the afternoon promenade in these gardens – with the English officers and their wives and daughters, English nursemaids and their charges, tourists of both sexes and all ages, and the whole surrounded by a polyglot and polychromatic crowd of Oriental listeners to the military band – is a sight well worth seeing and not readily to be forgotten.

But we must pursue our tour round the peninsula of the Rock; and leaving the new Mole on our right, and farther on the little land-locked basin of Rosia Bay, we pass the height of Buena Vista, crowned with its barracks, and so on to the apex of the promontory, Europa Point. Here are more barracks and, here on Europa Flats, another open and level space for recreation and military exercises beneath the cliff wall. Doubling the point, and returning for a short distance along the eastern side of the promontory, we come to the Governor’s Cottage, a cool summer retreat nestling close to the Rock, and virtually marking the limits of our exploration. For a little way beyond this the cliff rises inaccessible, the road ends, and we must retrace our steps. So far as walking or driving along the flat is concerned, the visitor who has reached the point may allege, with a certain kind of superficial accuracy, that he has “done Gibraltar.” No wonder that the seasoned globe-trotter from across the Atlantic thinks nothing of taking Calpe in his stride.

To those, however, who visit Gibraltar in a historic spirit, it is not to be “done” by any means so speedily as this. Indeed, it would be more correct to say that the work of a visitor of this order is hardly yet begun. For he will have come to Gibraltar not mainly to stroll on a sunny promenade, or to enjoy a shady drive round the seaward slopes of a Spanish headland, or even to feast his eyes on the glow of Southern color and the picturesque varieties of Southern life; but to inspect a great world-fortress, reared almost impregnable by the hand of Nature, and raised into absolute impregnability by the art of man; a spot made memorable from the very dawn of the modern period by the rivalries of nations, and famous for all time by one of the most heroic exploits recorded in the annals of the human race. To such an one, we say, the name of Gibraltar stands before and beyond everything for the Rock of the Great Siege; and he can no more think of it in the light of a Mediterranean watering-place, with, a romantic, if somewhat limited, sea-front, than he can think of the farmhouse of La Haye as an “interesting Flemish homestead,” or the Chateau of Hougoumont as a Belgian gentleman’s “eligible country house.”

For him the tour of the renowned fortifications will be the great event of his visit. Having furnished himself with the necessary authorization from the proper military authorities (for he will be reminded at every turn of the strict martial discipline under which he lives), he will proceed to ascend the Rock, making his first halt at a building which in all probability he will often before this have gazed upon and wondered at from below. This is the Moorish Castle, the first object to catch the eye of the newcomer as he steps ashore at the Mole, and looks up at the houses that clamber up the western slope of the Rock. Their ascending tiers are dominated by this battlemented pile, and it is from the level on which it stands that one enters the famous galleries of Gibraltar. The castle is one of the oldest Moorish buildings in Spain, the Arabic legend over the south gate recording it to have been built in 725 by Abu-Abul-Hajez. Its principal tower, the Torre del Homenaje, is riddled with shot marks, the scars left behind it by the ever-memorable siege. The galleries, which are tunneled in tiers along the north front of the Rock, are from two to three miles in extent. At one extremity they widen out into the spacious crypt known as the Hall of St. George, in which Nelson was feasted. No arches support these galleries; they are simply hewn from the solid rock, and pierced every dozen yards or so by port-holes, through each of which the black muzzle of a gun looks forth upon the Spanish mainland. They front the north, these grim watchdogs, and seeing that the plain lies hundreds of feet beneath them, and with that altitude of sheer rock face between them and it, they may perhaps be admitted to represent what a witty Frenchman has called le luxe et la coquetterie d’ imprenable, or as we might put it, a “refinement on the impregnable.” Artillery in position implies the possibility of regular siege operations, followed perhaps by an assault from the quarter which the guns command; but though the Spanish threw up elaborate works on the neutral ground in the second year of the great siege, neither then nor at any other time has an assault on the Rock from its northern side been contemplated. Yet it has once been “surprised” from its eastern side, which looks almost equally inaccessible; and farther on in his tour of exploration, the visitor will come upon traces of that unprecedented and unimitated exploit. After having duly inspected the galleries, he will ascend to the Signal Tower, known in Spanish days as El Hacho, or the Torch, the spot at which beacon fires were wont on occasion to be kindled. It is not quite the highest point of the Rock, but the view from it is one of the most imposing in the world. To the north lie the mountains of Ronda, and to the far east the Sierra of the Snows that looks down on Granada, gleams pale and spectral on the horizon. Far beneath you lie town and bay, the batteries with their tiny ordnance, and the harbor with its plaything ships; while farther onward, in the same line of vision, the African “Pillar of Hercules,” Ceuta, looks down upon the sunlit waters of the Strait.