Gibraltar, the rock two empires refused to share

Gibraltar takes its name from Jabal Tariq, the Mountain of Tariq, after Tariq ibn Ziyad, the Umayyad commander whose forces landed near the Rock in 711 and used it as a foothold for the conquest that brought most of the Iberian peninsula under Muslim rule within a few years. The name has survived, worn down over thirteen centuries of Arabic, Spanish and English into its current form, considerably longer than any single power has managed to hold the place it describes. It is a striking thing to consider from the deck of a cruise ship passing beneath the Rock today: the name on the map predates the country now flying its flag over it by the best part of a thousand years.

Nearly eight centuries, several dynasties

Muslim rule over Gibraltar lasted, with interruptions, from that landing until 1462, passing between various Andalusian and North African dynasties along the way; the Moorish Castle that still stands above the town, its square Tower of Homage a landmark from the harbour, was largely rebuilt in the fourteenth century by the Marinids, a Moroccan dynasty that held the Rock for a period, and it remains the most visible reminder of that long stretch of the Rock's history. Castile finally took Gibraltar for good in 1462, during the long Christian reconquest of the peninsula, and it stayed Spanish for the better part of two and a half centuries after that.

Taken once, kept "in perpetuity"

Britain's turn came in 1704, when an Anglo-Dutch fleet captured Gibraltar during the War of the Spanish Succession, nominally on behalf of a rival claimant to the Spanish throne rather than for Britain's own account. When the war ended, the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 formally ceded Gibraltar to the British crown "in perpetuity," a phrase Spain has periodically contested ever since without managing to change the fact of British rule on the ground.

Spain tried, more than once, to take it back by force. The most serious attempt, the Great Siege of 1779 to 1783, lasted nearly four years, a combined Spanish and French effort to starve and bombard the garrison into surrender that ranks among the longest sieges in British military history. It failed; the garrison, under General George Augustus Eliott, held out until the siege was lifted, and Gibraltar has remained British, without serious interruption, ever since.

Monkeys, tunnels and a garrison that never quite stood down

Gibraltar's Barbary macaques, the only wild monkey population anywhere in Europe, have become bound up with the Rock's sense of its own permanence: a long-standing piece of local folklore holds that British rule will end if the macaques ever leave, and, according to a widely told account, Winston Churchill ordered the population bolstered during the Second World War, when numbers had fallen worryingly low. Whatever the truth of that particular order, the monkeys remain, along with tens of kilometres of tunnels carved into the Rock during the Great Siege and vastly expanded during the two world wars, more tunnel than road, by most reckonings, within a peninsula that measures barely six square kilometres. Ambassador's Iberian Cities and Promenades, sailing from Portsmouth, calls here between Cádiz and Vigo, one stop among several on a route built around exactly this sort of layered port city.

Few places this small have changed hands quite so violently, or been defended quite so stubbornly once they were held. Gibraltar's current status remains a live diplomatic question between Britain and Spain; its history explains, better than any current negotiation could, why both sides have always taken it seriously.

A day ashore rarely allows time for more than the castle, the cable car and a walk down Main Street, but even that is usually enough to notice how many layers of the story are still standing rather than merely remembered. Fred. Olsen's Winter Warmth of Spain and Portugal, sailing from Southampton and calling at Gibraltar on its way from Cádiz to Vigo, gives a typical single day for exactly that.