About twenty minutes to cross the town centre end to end. The Upper Rock is a completely different question and it’ll take you a full day if you want to see all of it, which we didn’t quite manage. We counted roughly 30,000 steps across one day up there in August and still skipped a whole section.
Gibraltar is 6.7 square kilometres, which makes it sound like an easy afternoon, and the map really isn’t the thing that gets you. The vertical is.
Walking the Town
Genuinely easy, and genuinely lovely. Casemates Square to the beautiful Alameda Botanic Gardens is about thirty minutes at a wandering pace, and that takes in Main Street and everything hanging off it, including lanes with gorgeous names like Bomb House Lane and Secretary’s Lane that I stopped to photograph purely because of the signs.
The roads are properly surfaced, with no big cobbles and no loose rock, so I did two full days in flats and never once regretted it. Casemates to the airport runway is about ten minutes on foot.
On our second afternoon we stood on Main Street looking for a bus or a taxi back, waited a good while, found neither, and just walked the thirty minutes instead. It was no hardship at all, so don’t count on transport appearing, and honestly don’t worry much when it doesn’t.
Walking the Upper Rock
This is the part that eats a day, and distance really isn’t the reason.
The attractions zigzag across the entire mountain. There’s no one path that takes you past everything in a sensible order. Straight after coming through the entrance and starting to climb, we had to go back down again to reach the beautiful Windsor Suspension Bridge, and from there the route crisscrosses upward towards St Michael’s Cave. You’ll do this repeatedly.
Then add the heat, which is what really gets you. We went in peak August, sweated through everything we had on, and by mid afternoon plain water had stopped being enough. I really wish we’d brought electrolytes rather than another bottle of water.
It’s worth saying that I absolutely loved it anyway. The views over the harbour open up the whole way, there are old batteries and cannons at nearly every turn, and the bridge itself is one of the best things I’ve stood on anywhere.
Take the road going up and the steep staircase coming down. The staircase runs alongside the old cable car line and it doesn’t let up. The descent is where the damage is done: I could feel it on the hotel stairs that evening, and properly the following morning, which is worth knowing if you’ve got a second day planned.
Near the bottom the Devil’s Gap path turns rocky for its last stretch, roughly 200 metres of it. In flats, that’s the only part of the whole day that will genuinely test your feet. Then a beautiful set of steps with the flag and the word APES painted across the risers, and you’re back in the town centre.
Can You Walk Around the Whole of Gibraltar?
The town and the Upper Rock, yes, in one long day. The full territory including Europa Point and the west side bays is possible on foot and I wouldn’t do it, because the walking between them is the dull kind.
We drove that section on our second day and it was clearly the right call. Europa Point sits beyond two road tunnels, and the swimming bays on the west side are a long, shadeless way from town in August heat. Both have plenty of parking, even in peak summer, which honestly surprised me.
Bus route 3 covers Europa Point if you have no car, at £1.80. Getting around Gibraltar has the other routes and what each one cost us, and the best things to do in Gibraltar covers what’s actually worth walking to.
If you’re trying to work out whether one day is enough for all this, my honest answer is on facts about Gibraltar.
