Rock of Gibraltar, our second port of call on the cruise ship Celebrity Constellation

This was our second stop on our cross Atlantic cruise on the Celebrity ship, the Constellation. We landed in Gibraltar on April 19. This post is so late because we had a slow and expensive internet connection on the ship. We are now in Rome and I am catching up on this blog.

Neither one of us had ever been to Gibraltar (part of the United Kingdom) before and we were really excited to see it. It is a peninsula that is located at the entrance to the Mediterranean Sea and has been of strategic importance to many countries over the centuries. It has been a part of the United Kingdom since 1704. I actually had to get up at 6:30 AM for the tour and the sun did not come up until 7:30 so I got these wonderful photos of the sunrise over the rock of Gibraltar.

We arranged this private tour ourselves and we had five other people join our tour. (if you want more information about how to do this see our last post , Madeira ). Our group was very friendly and we had an awesome tour guide named Ronald. Here is a picture of us getting picked up at the ship; This tour was 3 hours long and Ronald took us to the major sites on the peninsula; the Europa Point lighthouse (where the Atlantic Ocean becomes the Mediterranean Sea), up to almost the top of the rock which is a nature reserve for the Barbary Apes. I loved seeing these smart animals being free to roam in their troops; then nature reserves feed them a healthy diet to supplement their natural findings.

A highlight of the tour was the exploration of St. Michael’s caves. The caves were at least 700 ft. deep and filled with dramatic columns of limestone that they had lit with blue and green lights.