Gibraltar

Inside Gibraltar’s World War 2 tunnels

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The RAF bomb disposal teams in Gibraltar are being kept busy, clearing ordnance left over from World War Two.

The Ministry of Defence is handing over miles of man-made tunnels inside the famous rock to the Gibraltan Government. But before that can happen, the tunnels need to be checked and cleared of left over explosives.

Gibraltar is famous for the spectacular rock, which dominates the landscape. Since the eighteenth century, it’s been used to help defend the peninsula. Over the last two hundred years, a series of intricate tunnels have been dug out.

At the peak of the tunnelling during WW2, in preparation to defend Gibraltar from a German invasion, enough space was carved out to hold sixteen thousand men inside the rock. Today, there are around thirty-six miles of tunnels in all. After the war, and as the threat from Spain and the Cold War subsided, the tunnels were gradually abandoned.

These days, the MoD is handing back many miles of tunnels to the Government of Gibraltar, who want to use them for storage, some are even being restored and turned into tourist attractions.

Before that can happen, they have to be safe, checked and cleared of any ordnance or explosives left behind. That’s the job of the RAF bomb disposal team. Theirs is a painstaking search through miles of damp, dark tunnels, scanning the rockface by torchlight, inch by inch, for signs of anything left behind.

If they do find something, they insert a special explosive into the hole, which destroys the remaining ordnance without disturbing the surrounding rock too much. The intricacy of this network of tunnels is breathtaking. Just getting access to them can be difficult.

The team has cleared three miles of tunnels so far, but it still has another ten miles to do, and that distance could increase as the MoD hands more over.