Gibraltar

Gibraltar is a British Overseas Territory at the southern tip of the Iberian Peninsula, controlling the 14-kilometre strait through which about a fifth of global seaborne trade passes between The Atlantic and the Mediterranean. It hosts Royal Navy Base Gibraltar, a garrison and staging point for naval operations reaching from The Atlantic to the Suez Canal route via the Red Sea.

The territory has a population of around 34,000. It returned a 99.99 per cent vote to remain British in a 1967 referendum and 98.5 per cent in 2002, results that have kept Gibraltar's status a recurring point of diplomatic tension with Spain, which maintains a sovereignty claim.

For the Royal Navy, Gibraltar's value is logistical rather than symbolic: fuel, maintenance and crew support for any vessel transiting between British home waters and operations further east, a role illustrated in May 2026 when the robot minehunter Ariadne was recovered into her support ship off Gibraltar en route to the Strait of Hormuz.