Gibraltar

Who the constitution means by the people of Gibraltar

The Gibraltar Constitution Order was made at Buckingham Palace on 14 December 2006, and its preamble opens with two British assurances. Gibraltar will remain part of the monarch's dominions unless an Act of Parliament provides otherwise, and the British government "will never enter into arrangements under which the people of Gibraltar would pass under the sovereignty of another state against their freely and democratically expressed wishes". The same preamble records that the people approved the constitution in a referendum on 30 November 2006.

The document leaves the phrase to local law. For the purposes of its chapter on fundamental rights, a person belongs to Gibraltar if that person is a Gibraltarian under the Gibraltarian Status Ordinance, and the constitution lets the legislature confer that status or withdraw it.

That law has been widened twice. The government's report on the 2022 census explains that an amendment of 1999 let the descendants of Gibraltarian women and their British husbands register at once, along with people who had naturalised and lived in Gibraltar for 25 years. A second amendment in 2014 cut the residence requirement for British citizens from 25 years to 10. Since the 2001 census the statistics office has counted as Gibraltarian everyone entitled to the status, whether registered or not, so the category in the table below is a legal one.

The count grew by more than 10,000 between 1970 and 2022 and the share barely moved: Gibraltarians were 76.5% of usual residents in 1970, 79.0% in 2012 and 76.6% in 2022. Moroccan residents fell from 1,798 in 1991 to 252 in 2022; Gibraltar had recruited Moroccan workers on renewable permits after Spain closed the frontier in 1969. How the parliament that administers the status law is elected and what it may decide is the subject of the politics article.

How Gibraltar's civilians left and came back

The town that Britain took in 1704 was taken in the name of a Spanish claimant, Charles III, and its inhabitants were offered their rights and religion if they swore loyalty to him. They refused. Most settled around the bay, and the camp at an old hermitage grew into San Roque, which Philip V described in 1706 as the City of Gibraltar resident in its Campo.

The first surviving civilian census, of 1753, counted 1,793 people: 597 Genoese, 572 Jews, 414 British, 185 Spaniards and 25 Portuguese. Genoese kept arriving, Maltese and Portuguese families followed in the nineteenth century, and the town grew crowded enough that Orders in Council of 1873 and 1885 restricted the right of residence to people born there. By 1891 nearly 75% of a population of 19,011 were Gibraltar-born. The legal category of Gibraltarian began there, as an answer to overcrowding.

The second departure came in May 1940. With Spain's entry into the war feared, the British government evacuated about 16,700 non-combatants, all the women, children and elderly among them, to the United Kingdom, Madeira, Jamaica and Tangier, under the principle that "the fortress comes first". Repatriation ran from April 1944 into 1951, and the account of Gibraltarian culture on Wikipedia records that the years away strengthened an identity distinct from a simply British one. The history article follows the whole sequence from the Neanderthal caves to the treaty of 2026, and the culture article traces the families by name and birthplace.

What the Rock of Gibraltar leaves room for

Britannica gives the peninsula as 5 kilometres long and 1.2 kilometres wide, joined to Spain by a low sandy isthmus. Most of it is the Rock, a ridge of Jurassic limestone rising to 426 metres, with sheer cliffs on the east and the town built up the gentler western slope.

The ground had no river and no easily reached spring, which is why the ancient settlement of the bay stood on the mainland. Drinking water now comes entirely from desalination, stored in reservoirs cut under the Rock. Space has been made the same way. Reclaimed land makes up about a tenth of the territory and housed over 40% of the population at the 2012 census, and the spoil from more than 50 kilometres of wartime tunnels went onto the isthmus to lengthen the airfield.

That isthmus is where the territorial dispute sits. Spain holds that the ground north of the old fortifications was never ceded and that the airfield occupies it illegally; the United Kingdom claims it by long possession. This catalogue records both positions and takes neither. On the eastern cliffs, UNESCO inscribed the Gorham's Cave Complex in 2016 for its record of Neanderthal occupation. The geography article covers the water, the tunnels, the reclamation and the strait.

How Gibraltar's voters answered the sovereignty question

Voters have been asked twice. On 10 September 1967, offered a choice between Spanish sovereignty and continued association with Britain, 12,138 chose Britain and 44 chose Spain. In November 2002 the Government of Gibraltar put a proposal to share sovereignty with Spain to its own referendum, and 17,900 voted no against 187 yes. London and Madrid both said that vote had no legal effect, and the joint sovereignty plan was abandoned.

The two sides read the same history through different principles. The United Nations has listed Gibraltar as a non-self-governing territory since the list was created in 1946. Spain reads the decolonisation resolutions as limiting self-determination where a colony disrupts a country's territorial integrity, and treats the question as one between Madrid and London. The Gibraltar government holds that the 2006 constitution completed its decolonisation and that the right of self-determination under the United Nations Charter prevails.

Day to day, the Governor keeps external affairs, defence and internal security, and elected ministers run the rest. The parliament has seventeen elected members, chosen in one territory-wide constituency in which each elector may vote for up to ten candidates.

Why half of Gibraltar's workforce lives in Spain

The people who vote on sovereignty and the people who produce Gibraltar's output are overlapping groups of different sizes. The October 2024 employment survey counted 31,634 employees, of whom 13,844 lived in Spain and crossed the frontier to work. The House of Commons Library, citing a Gibraltar government fact sheet, gave the number in July 2026 as over 15,000 frontier workers, more than half the workforce.

Spain has cut that supply of labour once. When it closed the land frontier on 9 June 1969, the 4,666 Spanish men who had crossed daily to work, over a third of the workforce, were withdrawn at a stroke. The government now aims to hold the labour market to a maximum of 32,000 employees, its minister told Parliament in July 2025, and measures output per worker, about £97,662 in 2024/25, because a figure per resident would count wages that leave for Spain.

Online gambling sold mostly to British customers produced about 30% of output and employed more than 3,400 people, by the government's account of December 2025. The economy article sets out the gambling sector, the finance centre and the fuel trade in the bay.

What language Gibraltarians use at home

The 2022 census asked for a main language for the first time, and 87.6% of residents aged 14 and over gave English, 5.6% Spanish and 2.5% Arabic. The form had no box for Llanito, the vernacular in which speakers switch between Andalusian Spanish and English inside one sentence, and a question about one main language has no way to record it.

Interviews collected for a study in The Round Table in 2024 point the same way. The researcher Andrew Canessa told it that "few people under the age of 30 in Gibraltar today have conversational Spanish".

Gibraltar's National Day falls on 10 September, the anniversary of the 1967 vote, and was first held as a rally in 1992 before the government made it a public holiday. The culture article covers the language, the religious census, the writers and the calentita sold on that day.

How visitors now enter Gibraltar

The treaty between the United Kingdom and the European Union in respect of Gibraltar was signed on 14 July 2026 and applied provisionally from the next day. It moves passport control to the port and the airport, where Gibraltar's officers check arrivals and Spanish officers then apply the Schengen rules, and it allows the 1.2 kilometre fence on the land frontier to be taken down. Article 2 states that it is without prejudice to either state's position on sovereignty.

Most people still come by land. The Borders and Coastguard Agency counted 9,263,400 arrivals over the land frontier in 2025, a figure that includes the workers who live in Spain. The airfield on the isthmus doubles as a Royal Air Force station, and until the Kingsway tunnel opened on 31 March 2023 the main road into Spain crossed its runway. The travel article covers the new checks, the Upper Rock, the cruise calendar and the seasons.

Where each thread of Gibraltar continues

Each section above is the short form of a longer article. The treaty of 1713 and the sieges are in Gibraltar: history, the limestone and the water in Gibraltar: geography, the Governor and the supermajorities in Gibraltar: politics, the workforce and the gambling duty in Gibraltar: economy, Llanito and the census in Gibraltar: culture, and the frontier and the airport in Gibraltar: travel.