Most southern point and ‘The Rock’

03-05/06/2019: Huerta Grande (close to Gibraltar)
Km travelled today/sum: 168km / 5112km
Sun shine, 25 degrees, country roads, ferry

From Seville we were heading south and according to the weather forecast, the temperature would drop by 10 degrees. And so it did. When we arrived in Traifa the temperature was around 20 degrees, which was a really nice cool change. We parked the bikes close to the most southern point of Europe and walked the rest.

Just as we got ready to ride off again, a woman approached us and we got to talking. She had driven her car from Germany to here and was on the way to visit a friend. Eventually we exchanged addresses and said good bye.

Off we went to the Isla de las Paloma, which was fortified.

When we arrived there, it was closed. The island was not accesible for tourists. Turns out that it’s now used as a camp for Migrants from Africa, sounds quite bad and sad… We took a picture from in front of the gate and went back. Bjoen was hoping to see a sign that mentioned the most Southern Point of mainland Europe, but there was nothing!

So we went back over the bridge and had a coffee, watching the kite surfer flying impressively through the air.

From here it was not far to our accommodation, which turned out to be a small house in a national park

After breakfast we hopped onto one bike and drove around the bay to Gibraltar, or the Rock, as the Spanish call it. We read in Lonely Planet that there is a long queue when trying to enter Gibraltar, which is an English enclave. Not sure, why there is a border crossing, since Spain and England are part of the EU (at least now, at the time when we were here). Anyway, I marked a carpark in Spain, where we would park the bike and walk through the border, no queues here. Unfortunately I missed the turn and got caught in the car queue. Lucky there was a pedestrian crossing which we used to get out. Here we parked the bike on the footpath, got rid of our riding gear, covered the bike and off we went to visit Gibraltar.

We got a stamp into our passport on the English side, we have jet to figure why. After passing the English border control, we spotted an English telephone booth J

From here we caught the public bus to the cable car, which we needed to reach the top of the rock. Here we joined a queue, luckily it didn’t take as long as we thought and we were on our way. We got to around 400m high, the view was fantastic!

And of course there were the monkeys (Barbary macaques).

The youngster examined the wind screen wiper J

We walked to the sky walk, which apparently was opened by Luke Skywalker J. It was not as impressive as I thought but the hanging bridge was!

We bought a ticket to use the cable car down, but to get to the hanging bridge we were already half way down anyway. The stairs back up were steep and plentiful, so walking down was easier 😁

On the stairs there was a monkey – he didn’t mind that we stepped over him J. After I took the photo and showed it to Sigrid, she laughed and said, it reminds her of me. I can’t see any resemblance.