Rock in a hard place
A row over an artificial reef and fishing rights has turned into a bitter war of words between Spain and the British colony. So how do you solve a problem like Gibraltar, asks Stephen Moss
Leoncio Fernandez Ramos is much in demand. “Please make this quick,” he says through a translator. “I don’t have much time.”
A film crew from Czech TV is waiting for him; a satellite television van of unknown provenance is lurking, too. The Spanish-Gibraltar stand-off has gone global and Ramos, the 67-year-old president of the fishing federation of La Linea and San Roque, is at the centre of the row.
I have tracked him down, after a three-hour pursuit, to a pier in La Linea, the impoverished little Spanish town on the other side of the Gibraltarian border. Boys swim in the clear waters; a fisherman is painting his boat; the view across to the Rock is lovely now the morning mist has cleared, leaving only a halo of cloud round the top. It is a beautiful setting for a bitter war of words.
The immediate cause of the battle between Gibraltar and Spain is the artificial reef that the British colony has lain around the Rock. Ramos says it is disrupting fishing in waters where Spanish boats have fished for generations.
“It was done to cause us problems,” he says, dismissing the Gibraltarian view that the reef – made from concrete blocks – is designed to help replenish fish stocks. “It exists only to stop us fishing.”
The Gibraltarians say these are their waters and that they can do what they like, but Ramos cites custom and practice.
“We’ve fished there for hundreds of years.”