Historic bastion in Gibraltar, once San Pablo bastion, defending mainland approaches.
North Bastion, formerly Baluarte San Pablo, is a bastion within Gibraltar’s fortifications. Based on the older Giralda tower built in 1309, it guarded Gibraltar’s northern land approaches from Spain. Strengthened after the British capture in 1704, it later became surrounded by reclaimed land and now contains Giralda Gardens and a pétanque club.
North Bastion, also known as Baluarte Norte or formerly Baluarte San Pablo, is a historic bastion forming part of the fortifications of Gibraltar. It stands in the north of the peninsula, where Gibraltar is accessible by land only along a narrow isthmus from Spain, and historically helped protect the town against attack from the mainland. The bastion was based on the earlier Giralda tower, built after Ferdinand IV of Castile took Gibraltar from the Moors in 1309. That strong tower, praised by the historian Alonso Hernández del Portillo, played a role during the 1333 siege when Alfonso XI of Castile failed to retake Gibraltar. Later, the Italian engineer Giovan Giacomo Paleari Fratino, working for Philip II of Spain in the 1560s, converted the tower into a bastion within a wider programme of defensive improvements. North Bastion projected from a curtain wall that ran to the Rock of Gibraltar and stood beside an old mole extending into the Bay of Gibraltar, forming a key element of the peninsula’s defenses. After the British capture of Gibraltar in 1704, the land in front was flooded and the curtain wall became the Grand Battery. Today, the bastion is on reclaimed land and occupied by Giralda Gardens and a pétanque club, with rehabilitation plans by the Government of Gibraltar.
