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This week episode 243, relie leaving Gibraltar.

After Spain's entry into the war with Britain in 1779, British leaders had to contend with the threat

of a combined French and Spanish fleet right in their own backyard.

It was only by luck that they avoided a full-scale invasion of Britain that year.

The combined French and Spanish fleets continued to pose a grave threat to Britain.

One of the main reasons that Spain entered the war was to regain possession of several territories that had had lost to Britain in earlier wars.

These included Menorca in the Mediterranean, the Florida's in the West Indies, but probably

the most galling for Spain was the British possession of Gibraltar,

a mountainous region at the southern tip of Spain itself.

Britain used control of Gibraltar to regulate the movement of ships in and out of the Mediterranean.

Britain, in cooperation with the Dutch, had first captured Gibraltar in 1704 during the War of Spanish Succession.

It was a highly defensible position having a castle built atop a rocky mountain,

first fortified by the Moors a thousand years earlier.

Spain had regularly besieged Gibraltar many times during the Middle Ages, finally taking

the castle. So they had controlled Gibraltar for several hundred years before losing it to Britain.

In 1713, the Treaty of Utrecht gave Gibraltar to Britain, but the Spanish were never really happy about an enemy country

holding valuable real estate in what they regarded as part of mainland Spain.

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