First, we partied with the locals on their special day, so now it was time to visit the most iconic attraction of Gibraltar, the little monkeys!
Since I had already walked up half the way up by mistake and knew how hard it was in the September heat, we decided to take the cable car and cut half of the suffering on our legs to better enjoy the promising views.
We bought the tickets online to avoid the cue and made our way there just in time for their opening at 9.30 am also to try and beat the tour buses. We got there and were really surprised with the age and overall look of the building and how senior unfriendly it was, all a bit tired for such a major tourist attraction.
Then the first cable car showed up and we were honestly expecting to have to share the car with a couple more people but not 12 or more and having to stand!? After all the two tickets had cost us 25£ for a single one-way trip! We got lucky to stay by the window but not really being able to move and fully appreciate the ride. When arriving at the top more of the same, a very unloved building with narrow stairs, poor old tourist struggling to circulate with a lack of any signage.
The views are amazing, that is granted especially if the Levante wind is not present.
A few monkeys had been fed on the side of the building but not many were present, we rushed through as the annoying tours were arriving.
We entered the Nature Reserve, no one asked us for a ticket and we also didn't see anyone looking to check if we had the right tickets or not. Our "cheap" tickets were only for the single cable car journey, not including the Nature Reserve and all attractions which is the other available tickets, our plan was to purchase the tickets as we needed since we were not interested in all attractions.
We decide to walk towards north following the tourist map, soon enough we confirmed our suspicions that both maps available to tourists don't really correspond to reality to the point we were not sure if we were on the right road or not. The sign markers aren't also very helpful because there's no continuity, the destination we want shows on one sign but doesn't show on the next leaving us to decide our luck at the intersection!
The good thing is that even a bit lost the views make up for it.
We didn't see many monkeys but the 7km walk we made in the reserve was quite nice.
More photos of Gibraltar can be seen on our Facebook album: Gibraltar- August 2017
***In the spirit of sharing our dreams and experiences we have shared this blog post in the NOFOREIGNLAND.COM website sailors community.