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More than 5000 entries on the history, culture and life of Britain (published in 1993 by Macmillan, now out of print)
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Gibraltar
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Rocky promontory at the southern tip of Spain which is an internally self-governing British dependent territory. Captured from Spain in 1704, during the War of the *Spanish Succession, it was ceded to Britain in 1713 by the treaty of *Utrecht. The most active Spanish attempt to recover it was the Great Siege of 1779–83. Its already great military importance, guarding the entrance to the Mediterranean, was much increased for Britain when the opening of the Suez canal in 1869 made this the sea route to India.
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Spanish claims on it intensified in the 1960s, but in a referendum of 1967 the people of Gibraltar voted overwhelmingly to preserve the link with Britain. In 1969 Spain closed the border, reopening it partly in 1982 and fully in 1985. In March 1988 Gibraltar was the scene of a controversial event when two men and a woman, members of the *IRA, were shot by the *SAS – a sequence of events investigated in *Death on the Rock. Tourism is an important part of the economy of the Rock, famous in particular for its Barbary apes.
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