Eight hundred years before the Romans, the Rock was already the fixed point of a seafaring world. This episode traces Gibraltar from the Tartessian kingdom of the Guadalquivir and the arrival of Phoenician navigators around 950 BC, through the coexistence of Turdetani and Phoenician communities around the Bay, to its place in classical myth as one of the Pillars of Hercules. It ends with Carthage turning the Rock into a naval lookout during the Second Punic War, and Rome's victory at Ilipa in 206 BC.

After the defeat of Carthage at Ilipa in 206 BC, the Bay of Gibraltar became part of the province of Hispania Ulterior. In 171 BC Rome founded Carteia on the Bay near modern San Roque, the first Roman colony established for freedmen and the sons of Roman soldiers and Iberian women. Pliny the Elder and Strabo wrote the Rock into legend as a Pillar of Hercules, yet archaeology shows almost no Roman building on Gibraltar itself: a lookout, a navigational mark, some quarrying. This episode follows six centuries of Roman rule to its collapse around AD 410 under pressure from the Vandals, Suebi and Alans.

Three centuries of a contested frontier, ending with a single landing that changed Europe.

When Roman rule in Hispania collapsed around 409, Vandals and Suebi poured into Iberia and the Visigoths were invited in to restore order. Driven south from Gaul after their defeat at Vouillé in 507, they fought the Byzantines for the southern coast until finally securing it around 624. Gibraltar became a fortified watchtower on the kingdom's southern edge, tied to the Diocese of Carteia and the church province of Hispalis (Seville), and drawn into the Catholic kingdom after King Reccared's conversion in 587. In 711 Tariq ibn Ziyad landed at the Rock, and Visigothic Spain fell.

Seven and a half centuries that gave the Rock its name and its castle.

Tariq ibn Ziyad's landing in 711 made this Jabal Tariq, the Mount of Tariq, the origin of the name Gibraltar. This episode follows the Rock through the Emirate and Caliphate of Córdoba, the fragmented taifa kingdoms, the Almoravids and Almohads, the Marinids and the Nasrids of Granada. In 1160 the Almohad caliph Abd al-Mu'min founded Madinat al-Fath, the fortified city whose foundations survive in the Moorish Castle and the Tower of Homage. Castile took the Rock briefly in 1309, the Marinids retook it in 1333 and built extensively, and Granada held it from 1374 until the final Castilian conquest of 1462.

How a vulnerable frontier town became the Key to Spain.

Captured from Granada in 1462 by forces of the Duke of Medina Sidonia, Gibraltar passed from noble lordship to direct royal control under Isabella I in 1501, and in 1502 received the arms it still bears: the red castle and golden key. The town's mosque became the church of Santa María la Coronada. The corsair raid of 1540 exposed the weakness of its defences and prompted Charles V's line wall and the Charles V Wall. Naval battles in the Bay in 1607 and 1621, Philip IV's inspection in 1624, and the engineering works of Luis Bravo de Acuña and Ottaviano Meni reshaped the town before the Anglo-Dutch capture of 1704.

How a garrison became a people.

Captured in 1704 and ceded to Britain under the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, Gibraltar withstood the siege of 1727 and the Great Siege of 1779 to 1783. Free port status from 1706 drew Genoese, Jewish, Portuguese and Spanish settlers, and over the nineteenth century a distinct Gibraltarian identity took shape alongside the fortress. The twentieth century tested it: refuge during the Spanish Civil War, the evacuation of the civilian population in the Second World War, and the closure of the frontier from 1969 to 1985. Each time the community came back more united.