The Brits are celebrating the 300th anniversary of Gibraltar being in British hands. It was ceded by Spain in the Treaty of Utrecht, 1713, made a colony in 1830. There have been two referendums in the last thirty years; they voted overwhelmingly to stay British. The Spaniards are not amused by all this. The Brits doen’t seem to care. Note the strategic importance of Gibraltar during the last three centuries. Gibraltar was, by the way, originally named Jabal Tariq (Tariq’s mount), named after Tariq ibn-Ziyad, the Berber who led an army of 7,000 to the rock in 711. I am told that later the Muslims changed the meaning of the name to the "Mountain of the Path", for the Path of Islam into the Iberian Peninsula, since tariq also means track or path, they didn’t want to give the impression that in their religious fervor they would name anything after a mere mortal; better to name it after the path of Islam into Iberia.