Couvreport Battery

The Landport (Spanish: Puerta de Tierra) is a gate into the territory of Gibraltar. It was originally the only entrance to the fortification from the land and so was heavily fortified and guarded.

Castle Batteries are a series of artillery batteries that are part of the Northern Defences of the British Overseas Territory of Gibraltar. The batteries descend from the Moorish Castle to end at the sixth and seven batteries which are known as Crutchett's Batteries. There are brick vaulted bombproof rooms (casemates) under Crutchets Battery. The batteries were part of the northern defences of Gibraltar. Armies can only attack Gibraltar without ships from the north and therefore this is heavily fortified around the only gate to Spain called Landport. Cornwell describes how this was defended by "several batteries, numerous batteries on the Glacis of Landport, by Crutchett's and the Grand Battery". He speculated that no army could withstand the grapeshot from 400 "pieces of heavy artillery".

Bomb Proof Battery was an artillery battery near Bomb Proof Barracks in the British Overseas Territory of Gibraltar. The battery was located at the south end of the King's Lines on the north-west face of the Rock of Gibraltar. It comprised a casemated battery built on two levels, each of which had two embrasures built into the old Spanish defences constructed above the then Puerta de Villavieja some time in the 16th century. The battery was partly built over when the King's Lines Battery was constructed. It was recorded as housing one 18-pdr (8.1 kg) and one 4-pdr (1.8 kg) in 1781, two 18-pdrs and one 24-pdr (10.9 kg) carronade in 1834, two 24-pdrs in 1859 and two 12-pdrs (5.4 kg) in 1885. It was re-equipped during the Second World War with a 25-pdr (11.3 kg) installed in 1941 and a 17-pdr (7.7 kg) anti-tank gun installed in 1943.

King's Lines Battery is an artillery battery in the British Overseas Territory of Gibraltar. It was originally built along the access path up to the Gate of Granada.

Granada Gate was a city gate in the British Overseas Territory of Gibraltar. It was the main entry point by land to the old town of Gibraltar.

Grand Battery is an artillery battery in the British Overseas Territory of Gibraltar. To the west of the grand battery was a very formidable flank which was considered to have been a "great annoyance to the besiegers." Known as the Muralla de San Bernando (English: St. Bernard's Wall) during Gibraltar's Spanish period, it was fully adapted to mount cannon facing the isthmus with the old Moorish archery towers being pulled down and replaced by bastions.This battery forms part of a series of batteries built on the Moorish and Spanish lines that zigzagged up the hill of the Moorish Castle to the Tower of Homage on the Rock of Gibraltar. Seven of these batteries were formed along the city's walls.

Hanover Battery was an artillery battery on the north west part of the British Overseas Territory of Gibraltar. The battery is casemated. Beneath the battery was a tunnel known as Hanover Gallery.

Operation Flavius (also referred to as the Gibraltar killings) was a military operation in which three members of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) were controversially shot dead by the British Special Air Service (SAS) in Gibraltar on 6 March 1988. The trio were believed to be planning a car bomb attack on British military personnel in Gibraltar. They were shot dead while leaving the territory, having parked a car. All three were found to be unarmed, and no bomb was discovered in the car, leading to accusations that the British government had conspired to murder them. An inquest in Gibraltar ruled that the authorities had acted lawfully but the European Court of Human Rights held that, although there had been no conspiracy, the planning and control of the operation was so flawed as to make the use of lethal force almost inevitable. The deaths were the first in a chain of violent events in a fourteen-day period. On 16 March, the funeral of the three IRA members was attacked, leaving three mourners dead. At the funeral of one, two British soldiers were killed after driving into the procession in error. In late 1987, British authorities became aware of an IRA plan to detonate a bomb outside the governor's residence in Gibraltar. On the day of the shootings, known IRA member Seán Savage was seen parking a car near the assembly area for the parade; fellow members Daniel McCann and Mairéad Farrell were seen crossing the border shortly afterwards. As SAS personnel moved to intercept the three, Savage split from McCann and Farrell and ran south. Two soldiers pursued Savage while two others approached McCann and Farrell. The soldiers reported seeing the IRA members make threatening movements when challenged, so the soldiers shot them multiple times. All three were found to be unarmed, and Savage's car did not contain a bomb, though a second car, containing explosives, was later found in Spain. Two months after the shootings, the documentary "Death on the Rock" was broadcast on British television. Using reconstructions and eyewitness accounts, it presented the possibility that the three IRA members had been unlawfully killed. The inquest into the deaths began in September 1988. The authorities stated that the IRA team had been tracked to Málaga, where they were lost by the Spanish police, and that the three did not re-emerge until Savage was seen parking his car in Gibraltar. The soldiers testified that they believed the suspected bombers had been reaching for weapons or a remote detonator. Several eyewitnesses recalled seeing the three shot without warning, with their hands up, or while they were on the ground. One witness, who told "Death on the Rock" he saw a soldier fire at Savage repeatedly while he was on the ground, retracted his statement at the inquest, prompting an inquiry into the programme which largely vindicated it. The inquest returned a verdict of lawful killing. Dissatisfied, the families took the case to the European Court of Human Rights. Delivering its judgement in 1995, the court found that the operation had been in violation of Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights as the authorities' failure to arrest the suspects at the border, combined with the information given to the soldiers, rendered the use of lethal force almost inevitable. The decision is cited as a landmark case in the use of force by the state.

The King's Lines are a walled rock-cut trench on the lower slopes of the north-west face of the Rock of Gibraltar. Forming part of the Northern Defences of the fortifications of Gibraltar, they were originally created some time during the periods when Gibraltar was under the control of the Moors or Spanish. They are depicted in a 1627 map by Don Luis Bravo de Acuña, which shows their parapet following a tenaille trace. The lines seem to have been altered subsequently, as maps from the start of the 18th century show a more erratic course leading from the Landport, Gibraltar's main land entrance, to the Round Tower, a fortification at their western end. A 1704 map by Johannes Kip calls the Lines the "Communication Line of the Round Tower".In 1704, an Anglo-Dutch force captured Gibraltar in the name of Charles, Archduke of Austria who claimed the crown of Spain during the War of the Spanish Succession. The Lines were named after him. They saw use during the Twelfth Siege of Gibraltar (1704–5), when the Spanish and their French allies succeeded in breaching the defences but were repelled; during the Thirteenth Siege (1727), when they were bombarded by the Spanish; and during the Great Siege (1779–83), when they were again under Spanish bombardment. During the tenure of William Green as Gibraltar's Senior Engineer from 1761 to 1783, the Lines were repaired, improved and fortified, and the cliffs below were scarped to make them impossible to climb. Facing west towards the Bay of Gibraltar, they were intended to make it possible to enfilade any attacking force trying to reach the gates of Gibraltar; they are connected to the Queen's Lines via a communication gallery completed on 13 September 1782. Following the Great Siege, the British bored a tunnel called the Hanover Gallery to connect the King's Lines to the Landport near No. 3 Castle Battery. A communication trench was also dug to the nearby Prince's Lines. Behind the King's Lines, the British dug a tunnel, called the King's Gallery, which ran parallel with the Lines to link them to the Queen's Lines and could be used as a bombproof shelter.Together with the Landport Front defences, the three sets of Lines constituted such a formidable obstacle that the Spanish called the landward approach to Gibraltar el boca de fuego, the "mouth of fire". A British clergyman, William Robertson, recorded his impressions of the Lines from his visit there in 1841: The lower lines consist of two lines of excavations, one above the other, communicating by subterranean passages and stairs. They are much shorter than the upper lines, and as excavations less remarkable, but as batteries they are far more formidable, and are considered exquisite specimens of fortification. The batteries here are not subterranean, like this in the upper lines, but stand out from the face of the rock; but the communications are chiefly excavated through the rock, in which there is also hollowed out a spacious hall for a mess-room, and, in fact, a complete barrack for the soldiers. The King's Lines were used as an artillery platform for over 200 years. During the Anglo-Spanish War of 1762–3, five 9-pdrs and one 6-pdr were recorded as being mounted on the Lines. Two 14-gun positions were established on the Lines for the Great Siege, at a point which was called either King's Battery or Black Battery. During World War II the Lines were redeveloped with a second wall built behind the parapet and the resulting space roofed over, to provide positions for machine guns and Hotchkiss anti-tank guns. The Lines are now abandoned, overgrown and not officially open to the public, although they have been described as "not merely one of the most, [but] perhaps the most, hauntingly vivid experiences of a visit to Gibraltar . . . [standing] comparison with some of the most famous military sites in the world." As John Harris of the Royal Institute of British Architects has put it, they are "capable of providing one of the great architectural experiences in the western world . . . the atmosphere of the Great Siege is vivid and evocative in the extreme." The Gibraltar Conservation Society proposed a £500,000 scheme in the early 1980s to preserve and reopen the Lines and the surrounding batteries, galleries and bombproof magazines, but the scheme did not go ahead and the Lines have continued to be neglected and vandalised despite being scheduled as an Ancient Monument. It is possible to visit the King's Lines with guided tours, the area has been cleaned up and prepared for this.

The North Bastion, formerly the Baluarte San Pablo (St. Paul's Bastion) was part of the fortifications of Gibraltar, in the north of the peninsula, protecting the town against attack from the mainland of Spain. The bastion was based on the older Giralda tower, built in 1309. The bastion, with a mole that extended into the Bay of Gibraltar to the west and a curtain wall stretching to the Rock of Gibraltar on its east, was a key element in the defenses of the peninsula. After the British took Gibraltar in 1704 they further strengthened these fortifications, flooding the land in front and turning the curtain wall into the Grand Battery. Today, the bastion is surrounded by reclaimed land to the west and north. Glacis Road runs along the base of the bastion's former glacis. Smith Dorrien Avenue separates the bastion from the curtain wall, which is still largely intact. The bastion is occupied by the Giralda Gardens and a pétanque club. The Government of Gibraltar has plans to rehabilitate the site as part of a plan to develop the old fortifications as tourist attractions.

Grand Casemates Square (colloquially Casemates Square or Casemates) is the larger of the two main squares within the city centre of Gibraltar (the other being John Mackintosh Square). The square takes its name from the British-built Grand Casemates, a casemate and bombproof barracks at the northern end of the square completed in 1817.Located at the northern end of Main Street, the square is lined with numerous pubs, bars and restaurants and acts as the gateway into Gibraltar's city centre for most tourists.

Gibraltar National Day, celebrated annually on 10 September, is the official national day of the British overseas territory of Gibraltar. The day commemorates Gibraltar's first sovereignty referendum of 1967, in which Gibraltarian voters were asked whether they wished to either pass under Spanish sovereignty, or remain under British sovereignty, with institutions of self-government.