It was inhabited from an early date. A skull found there in 1848 was later identified as that of a Neanderthal Man (the term had not yet been coined - if the importance of the find had been realised, we would be talking about Gibraltar Man instead). The Phoenicians gave it its first recorded name, Calpe, which probably means "hollowed out" and may refer to its tremendous cave system (Gibraltar really is hollow, from water erosion of the limestone). Greeks and Romans kept the name, and considered it one of the Pillars of Hercules, the other being across the strait in North Africa.

In 711, Tariq ibn-Ziyad and a small Berber army landed there on an amazingly successful mission of conquest. So the Rock became Jabal Tariq, جبل طارق, "Tariq's mountain" - Gibraltar. The Moors built the castle there which still looks over the strait to Africa. Six hundred years later, at the beginning of the fourteen century, the castle was taken and held by the Christians for a few years until it was recaptured by the Moors, who rebuilt it - the present keep dates from this time - and the Rock remained in Muslim hands until Gibraltar was finally reconquered in 1462.

The fall of Granada to the Catholic Monarchs in 1492 marked the end of nearly eight hundred years of Muslim Spain. Gibraltar was made a crown possession a few years later, at the beginning of the 16th century. The 1540's saw the rise of the Barbary pirates, who sailed from the Moroccan coast next to modern Rabat, and for whom Gibraltar was just too close to resist, and the castle was heavily fortified against them.

The roots, reasons, rights and wrongs of the War of the Spanish Succession are much too complicated to go into here. But it engulfed Europe between 1701 and 1714, and in 1704 an English fleet and an Anglo-Dutch force of marines took Gibraltar with relative ease. The vast bulk of the population fled - the present inhabitants are descendants of Genoans and other Italians, Maltese, Portuguese and, of course, English colonists.

It was declared a free port in the following year and British possession was formalised in the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713, which stripped Spain of most of its overseas holdings. The treaty notwithstanding, the Spaniards besieged it repeatedly throughout the eighteenth century, particularly in the Great Siege from 1779 to 1783, which lasted over three and a half years. The galleries date from this time.

No sooner was war with Spain over than revolutionary, then imperial France became a threat to the peace of Europe. Gibraltar was rebuilt and was the naval base for Lord Nelson's fleet which defeated the combined Spanish and French forces at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805.

After the end of the Peninsula War in 1814 (and its codicil, Waterloo, 1815), Gibraltar prospered as a trade centre and became a Crown Colony in 1830. Throughout the rest of the century, Gibraltar made successive encroachments on Spanish territory. These were actually fenced in in 1922 and the present airport is situated on them.

In the Second World War, Gibraltar's civilian population was evacuated, mainly to allow room for the garrison and other troops.

The first referendum on returning Gibraltar to Spain was held in 1967 and unsurprisingly the Gibraltarians rejected the idea flatly. Franco closed the border in 1969, a blockade which was not fully lifted until 1985, well after his death. In other words, the British Dependent Territory endured years of what was, to all intents and purposes, a seige. It held out, and has never forgotten.

Now that Gibraltar's status as a military base is much reduced - the garrison left in the early nineties - its prosperity comes from tourism and off-shore banking (and let's face it, not a little money laundering).

Negotiations between Britain and Spain led to another referendum being held in Gibraltar in 2002 with predictable results. The Rock's residents turned out en masse to vote and returned a resounding 98% against any agreement between Spain and Britain to share sovereignty.

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* Top photo copyright and courtesy of Jim Crone.