Trekking in Gibraltar: In Search of the Perfect Gin

Day 32, 2024 Ultimate Mediterranean

Tuesday, Dec. 10, 2024; Gibraltar.

I hardly recognized Gibraltar today for all its growth since my previous stops here in 2011 and 2013. The first time we took the traditional tour to the top of the rock to see the caves, views and especially the Barbary Apes (actually Macaque monkeys). Legend has it that as long as they live on the rock, Britain will rule Gibraltar. Mom loved their playful nature.

The second time I toured the botanical gardens and spent the rest of my day ashore seeking Wi-Fi. I don’t miss those days. Today’s onboard Wi-Fi service isn’t cheap, but its quality is generally great since the upgrade to Starlink service. I wrote about that visit in a “cruise flashback” during the pandemic.

Today the walk to the city gates from the cruise pier is lined with shops, businesses, apartment buildings and a school that weren’t here a decade ago. It also is longer than I remembered, but neither the pier nor the ancient gate have moved, so it must be me. Everywhere you are reminded that Gibraltar is a British overseas territory, famous for its shopping.

We arrived at 4 p.m., two hours later than originally scheduled due to our late departure from Cagliari. With sunset in just two hours, everyone was eager to get off the ship immediately, especially those going to the top of the rock. Cruise Director Nick asked the rest of us wait to give tours time to disembark. The wait was only about 20 minutes.

I had a destination in mind: Spirit of the Rock, a small-batch gin distillery about a mile and half from the cruise pier.

Its award-winning Campion London Dry Gin is made with the Gibraltar Campion (silene tomentosa), a plant that “grows wild on the upper reaches of the Rock of Gibraltar and is found nowhere else in the world,” according to the marketing brochure.

Being a lover of G&Ts (gin and tonics), I couldn’t pass it up after hearing about the distillery from fellow passengers. To be honest, I’m not a great connoisseur of gin – I’m pickier about my tonic. But hey, I have an image to uphold. So off I went for the mile-and-a-half trek, hoping the storefront would still be open.

It was, barely. I had missed the afternoon Gibraltar Gin Experience, a tasting of their three main and six historic gins. But the proprietor was happy to give me a generous sample of the Campion, on ice and with orange zest (never lime, she said). One of its features is that it is smooth enough to drink neat with ice – something I don’t typically do. It definitely got better the more I drank!

And just like that, I lost my mind and bought three bottles – the Campion, the Gibraltar Candytuft Gin (Gibraltar is the only place this North African plant grows wild on mainland Europe) and the Pink Premium Gin (light and sweet with strawberries and passion fruit; great for summer).

I threw in a sampler of small bottles of the historic gins, never thinking about how heavy the total load would be for my trek back to the ship. It saved me from shopping much on my return at Marks & Spencer, one of my favorite British department stores. It didn’t save me from ducking into a grocery store for some Maltesers, only to find more for sale in the cruise terminal.

We have two more nearby ports – Tangier, Morocco, and Cadiz, Spain – before we end this legendary cruise with eight sea days crossing the Atlantic.