Gibraltar's culture: Spanish at home, English in the census

Who settled Gibraltar after the Spanish town emptied

Gibraltar's civilian culture starts from an almost empty town. When the Spanish garrison marched out on 7 August 1704, about 4,000 inhabitants left with it, and about 70 people stayed, most of them Genoese traders who had taken neither side. The departure itself belongs to the history of the Rock. The people who came in to replace them are recorded name by name in the censuses.

The earliest surviving census of the whole civilian population dates from 1753, four years after a civilian administration was set up under a Civil Secretary. It counted 1,793 civilians: 597 Genoese, 572 Jews, 414 British, 185 Spaniards and 25 Portuguese. The next detailed count, taken at General Boyd's command in February 1777, listed 3,201 inhabitants by religion, 506 Protestants, 1,832 Roman Catholics and 863 Jews, and it recorded where each Catholic had been born.

The same list carries each person's occupation, and the government's 2022 census report picks out an oysterman, mantua makers, lime burners, lamplighters and a "Teacher of the Italian". The Genoese kept arriving. The population had trebled to 10,136 by 1814, when Gibraltar was a port British goods could still pass through during the Napoleonic Wars, and most of the recent arrivals came from Genoa. By 1878 up to 1,840 men of the Genoese fishing fleet were based at Catalan Bay for each season, sheltering on the beach or in caves, and some stayed on until a permanent village had formed there. Maltese and Portuguese families followed in the nineteenth century to work and trade around the military base.

Residence was then closed. Orders in Council of 1873 and 1885 reserved the right to live in Gibraltar to people born there, with everyone else on permits, and by 1891 nearly 75% of the 19,011 inhabitants were Gibraltar-born. That year's count also found 695 Maltese and 1,869 Spaniards, of whom 1,341 were women.

The mixture is still legible in two places. One is the surname: Bossano, Canessa, Imossi and Montegriffo are Genoese, Azzopardi, Buttigieg and Caruana Maltese, Coelho and Netto Portuguese, Abudarham, Benady and Serfaty Sephardic, and they are usually paired with English first names. The other is the old town, rebuilt after the Great Siege. Giovanni Maria Boschetti, who arrived from Milan in 1784 aged 25, built the Victualling Yard and many other buildings, and the chief executive of the Gibraltar Heritage Trust has described the style he set as "military-ordnance-style arched doorways, Italianate stucco relief, Genoese shutters, English Regency ironwork balconies, Spanish stained glass and Georgian sash and casement windows".

How Llanito switches between Spanish and English

Gibraltarians often call themselves Llanitos, after the vernacular. The sources that describe it place it in three different families. Wikipedia's article on Gibraltar calls it a vernacular based on Andalusian Spanish, mixed heavily with British English and with elements of Maltese, Portuguese, Genoese Italian and Haketia, a Judaeo-Spanish dialect. Britannica spells it Yanito and calls it an English dialect influenced by Spanish, Genoese and Hebrew. A 2024 study published in The Round Table, the Commonwealth journal of international affairs, treats it as a form of code-switching between Gibraltar-Spanish and Gibraltar-English, with culturally specific words and loanwords from other Mediterranean dialects dropped in.

The Round Table study sets out three language systems side by side, Gibraltar-Spanish, Gibraltar-English and Llanito, and dates their balance. In the early twentieth century Gibraltar-Spanish was the language of the home, of social life and of business. It quotes the colonial secretary of that period, Alexander Beattie, as disappointed that "in one of Britain's oldest colonies, [where] one would expect to hear English [...] I have not heard a word of it. I might as well have been in La Línea". He appealed to Gibraltarians to give first place to the language of the empire.

The Spanish half kept being renewed from across the frontier. The study credits intermarriage between Gibraltarian men and Spanish women with replenishing Gibraltar-Spanish from one generation to the next, and the 1891 count of Spanish residents, nearly three quarters of them women, fits that account. Many families still have relatives on the other side of the frontier, known in Spanish as La Verja, the fence. The linguist Dale Buttigieg, quoted in the same study, describes Llanito as "my mother tongue [...] and an important part of my Gibraltarian identity".

Why English moved into Gibraltar's homes

Two events pushed English from the office into the household, and both removed Gibraltarians from Spanish surroundings for years at a time.

The first was the evacuation. In May 1940 the British government decided to move the whole civilian population out, on the principle that "the fortress comes first". The 2022 census report puts the number at about 16,700 non-combatants, including all women, children and elderly people, sent to the United Kingdom, Madeira, Jamaica and Tangier; in London they went mainly to Fulham and Kensington, and others went to Ballymena in Northern Ireland. Repatriation ran from April 1944 to early 1951, and about 1,000 people chose to settle abroad. The Round Table study links the London years to a new attachment to English, and the account of Gibraltarian culture on Wikipedia says the evacuation strengthened a Gibraltarian identity distinct from a simply British one.

The second was the frontier. Spain closed the land frontier on 9 June 1969, which withdrew 4,666 Spanish men who had crossed daily to work, more than a third of the workforce, and the direct ferry from Algeciras was suspended on 26 June. Telephone links were cut too. Families with relatives in La Línea shouted to each other across the border gates, or travelled by ferry to Tangier and on by a second ferry to Algeciras, half a day for a crossing that had been a walk. Gibraltar recruited Moroccan workers to fill the jobs, on renewable work permits. The frontier partly reopened in December 1982 and fully in February 1985, and the Round Table study records that the closure left an anti-Spanish sentiment running through Gibraltarian nationalism.

English also had the institutions. It is the only official language used in government, commerce, education and the media. Schools follow the English National Curriculum through its Key Stages, and until the University of Gibraltar opened in September 2015 every student going on to a degree had to leave the territory to take it, most of them to British universities. Up to 16 December 2006 every flight from Gibraltar's airport went to the United Kingdom.

What the first language question recorded

The census taken on 14 November 2022 counted 37,936 usual residents, and for the first time it asked each resident to name a main language. The form offered two answers, "English" and "Other", with space to name the other. It had no box for Llanito, and a form that asks for one main language has no way to record a speaker who moves between two.

Of residents aged 14 and over, 87.6% gave English, 5.6% Spanish and 2.5% Arabic in 2022, and British Sign Language was the main language of 0.01%. The 3,974 people who gave a language other than English, 12.4% of that age group, were asked how well they spoke English: 64.0% described themselves as fluent and 9.8% said they could not speak it. Among respondents of Gibraltarian nationality who named another main language, 13.2% said they could not speak English.

The census cannot say how much Spanish is spoken beside English, and the Round Table study went looking for that through interviews. The researcher Andrew Canessa told it that "few people under the age of 30 in Gibraltar today have conversational Spanish", and described older people talking to each other in Spanish and switching to English when they turned to young children, a habit he put down to Spanish being heard as lower status. A government minister interviewed for the study described a Spanish-speaking grandmother babysitting a grandchild who spoke only English, and ringing the child's mother at work to translate. The general account on Wikipedia says the same of Llanito: younger Gibraltarians speak little or none of it, though they learn Spanish at school.

The study also collected songs passed from mothers and grandmothers to small children: "Sana, sana, colita de rana", sung to a child who has been hurt, a counting game played on a child's toes, and a lullaby warning that "viene el mono", the monkey is coming, for children who will not sleep. All three are in Spanish.

How Gibraltar's religious census has shifted

The 1911 census added a question on religion that the 1901 count had left out, and the government's 2022 report sets the last six counts side by side. Four of them are shown here.

The Catholic count has risen at every census while its share has fallen, from 72.1% in 2012 to 63.5% in 2022. The Church of England accounted for 6.7% and Muslims for 5.0% in 2022. Residents stating no religion reached 14.1% in 2022, against 7.1% in 2012 and 2.9% in 2001.

The Catholic diocese of Gibraltar answers directly to the Vatican, and its cathedral, Saint Mary the Crowned, dates from the sixteenth century. The Anglican Cathedral of the Holy Trinity is the seat of a Bishop of Gibraltar in Europe, whose diocese covers the Church of England's congregations on the continent. The Church of Scotland's St Andrew's closed in 2022.

The Jewish community has the longest documented thread. The World Jewish Congress records a Jewish presence from 1356 and the expulsion of that community with the rest of Spain's Jews in 1492. Spain wanted Jews kept out under the Treaty of Utrecht; Britain did not agree, and Spain listed the presence of Jews and Moors among its grounds for declaring the treaty's Gibraltar provisions void in 1727. Jews received the right of permanent settlement in 1749, and Congregation Sha'ar HaShamayim was founded after that. The 1753 census counted 572 Jews in a civilian population of 1,793. Four Orthodox synagogues hold regular services, the community runs its own schools and burial grounds, and the government funds a kosher home for the elderly.

Most Moroccan residents are Muslim, and the Ibrahim-al-Ibrahim Mosque at Europa Point was paid for by Saudi Arabia. Most Indian residents are Hindu, with a temple of their own, and many shops on Main Street are Indian-owned.

How National Day turned a referendum into a festival

On 10 September 1967 Gibraltar's voters chose between Spanish sovereignty and continued association with Britain, and the result was 12,138 to 44. The politics article covers what that vote did to the constitution. Its cultural afterlife began twenty-five years later. In 1992 the Self Determination for Gibraltar Group held the first National Day in John Mackintosh Square on the anniversary, and the crowd was larger than the square could hold. The government declared 10 September a public holiday. The event moved to Grand Casemates Square in 1993 and to the Naval Ground in 1998.

The day was political from the start, and the political part has been trimmed. The government took over the rally from the group in 2007, and in 2008 it stopped organising one, moved the main event back to John Mackintosh Square and handed it to the Mayor, who reads a National Day declaration from the City Hall balcony and names that year's recipients of the Gibraltar Medallion of Honour. Mayor Solomon Levy read the first declaration in 2008.

Most Gibraltarians dress in red and white on the day. Children's fancy dress opens it in the lobby of the Parliament building on Main Street, and a street party follows with stalls selling calentita. A school choir sings "Llévame Donde Nací" and "Virgencita de Europa", both with Spanish titles. From 1992 30,000 red and white balloons, representing the people of Gibraltar, were released from atop the Parliament building; the release was ended in 2016 because of the threat the balloons posed to wildlife, particularly marine life. The night closes with half an hour of synchronised fireworks from the Detached Mole in the harbour. In 2026 the holiday fell on Thursday 10 September, one of 12 bank and public holidays on the government's list for the year.

The other large civic occasion was one day only. On Tercentenary Day, 4 August 2004, three hundred years after the capture, Gibraltar granted the Royal Navy the Freedom of the City, and a human chain of Gibraltarians dressed in red, white and blue joined hands around the Rock.

What Gibraltarians wrote and in which language

The written record follows the spoken one, beginning in Spanish and moving into English. Héctor Licudi's novel Barbarita of 1929, probably the first Gibraltarian work of fiction, was written in Spanish and follows a young Gibraltarian man through largely autobiographical adventures. Leopoldo Sanguinetti, Albert Joseph Patron and Alberto Pizzarello published anthologies of poetry in the 1940s and 1950s. The 1960s belonged to the playwright Elio Cruz, whose two Spanish-language plays La Lola se va pá Londre and Connie con cama camera en el comedor were widely praised.

The bilingual writers came next. Mario Arroyo published Profiles in 1994, a series of meditations on love, loneliness and death in two languages. Trino Cruz began writing poetry in English, now writes mainly in Spanish, and translates poetry from the Maghreb. Later prose carries English titles: Mary Chiappe's essays Cabbages and Kings (2006), M. G. Sanchez's Rock Black: Ten Gibraltarian Stories (2008) and Diary of a Victorian Colonial (2009), and a run of detective novels by Chiappe and Sam Benady about Bresciano, a nineteenth-century Gibraltarian investigator. Sanchez has also written in The Times about the decline of Llanito.

Popular music splits the same way. Melon Diesel, active from 1995 to 2003, built its following in Spain and Latin America, and the band Taxi reached the Spanish charts with songs nearly all in Spanish. Breed 77, active from 1996 to 2018, found its audience in Britain and the rest of Europe. Albert Hammond wrote songs recorded by Whitney Houston, Tina Turner and Julio Iglesias.

The Gibraltar Broadcasting Corporation runs a television station and a radio service, and the Gibraltar Chronicle publishes daily in English. Spanish television is received easily and widely watched, and British satellite channels, Sky and the BBC among them, keep Gibraltarians as familiar with British news as viewers in the United Kingdom. James Joyce made Molly Bloom of Ulysses (1922) a native of Gibraltar, and a sculpture of her by the local artist Jon Searle stands in the Alameda Gardens.

How calentita and football carry the mixture

Gibraltarian cooking draws on Malta, Genoa, Portugal, Andalusia and Britain, and the dish most often named for it is calentita, a baked bread-like dish of chickpea flour, water, olive oil, salt and pepper. It is sold at the stalls of the National Day street party. Bollo de hornazzo is another recipe named as Gibraltar's own.

Many Gibraltarians support FC Barcelona or Real Madrid alongside Manchester United or Arsenal. The Gibraltar Football Association was founded in 1895 as the Gibraltar Civilian Football Association, set up a league in 1905 and affiliated with the English Football Association in 1909. By 1901 it fielded a representative team against military sides, and that team drew with Real Madrid in 1949.

The association's application to join UEFA drew strong opposition from the Royal Spanish Football Federation and was declined in 2007. Gibraltar took the case to the Court of Arbitration for Sport and was confirmed as a UEFA member on 24 May 2013. Its first match was a goalless draw against Slovakia, it went on to play in the qualifying rounds for Euro 2016, and its first win in a UEFA competition came on 13 October 2018, 1 to 0 against Armenia. On 2 May 2016 the same court ordered FIFA to stop blocking Gibraltar's application "without delay".

Cricket is older and came with the garrison. Servicemen played from the late eighteenth century, a ground north of the Rock existed by 1800 and civilians were playing by 1822. The Gibraltar Cricket Club was formed in 1883. In 1890 a ship carrying the Australian team to England put into Gibraltar after a collision, and a garrison side was bowled out for 25 against an Australian total of 150 for 8. Gibraltar first played in the ICC Trophy in 1982. The Campo Gibraltar rugby union club plays all its matches on the Spanish side of the frontier.