Gibraltar Omitted From Plans For Europe-African Link Across The Strait

Grand plans for a link between Africa and Europe, either using a massive suspension bridge or by tunneling under the sea-bed, have been on the drawing boards of dreamers for more than a century. Even Fernand de Lesseps – the French civil engineer who built the Suez Canal and would have cut a similar, though smaller, sea-lane across Gibraltar’s isthmus had the British Government not changed its mind – explored the possibility of a pontoon bridge across the Strait, but discarded it as impractical.

And a few years ago a group of American engineers and academics mooted a suspension bridge which would have had its main anchors on the southern side of the Rock and on the slopes of Jebel Musa – the two original Pillars of Hercules of ancient legend. But this too drifted up the academic chimneys of the MIT’s ivory towers. Certainly no-one in Gibraltar took it seriously.

“Despite decades of dreaming, no one has been able to bridge the physical divide that opened between the two continents more than five million years ago, forming the geological bottleneck to the Mediterranean Sea,” a US expert wrote this week.

But the dreams seem set to change and take shape as reality, according to reports broadcast on the BBC’s Radio Four programme earlier this week and echoed in several American newspapers. This time the governments of Morocco and Spain have taken significant steps to move forward with plans to bore a railroad under the sea-bed of the Strait of Gibraltar.

Gibraltar is left out of the new proposals which would link Cape Malabata in Morocco to Punta Paloma in Spain. This is a far longer route than other proposals, most of which have taken the shortest route between the two continents, linking Tarifa on Spain’s southern tip with the coast near Tangier – a direct line as the seagull flies and a mere nine miles across sometimes treacherous seas. The proposed route would cover some 20 miles.

If built, the project would rank among the world's most ambitious and complex civil engineering feats, alongside the Panama Canal and the Channel Tunnel between Britain and France