Eighteenth-century British defensive curtain wall forming Gibraltar’s western coastal fortifications.
Line Wall Curtain is a defensive curtain wall forming part of Gibraltar’s fortifications. It runs from North Bastion along the western coast to Engineer Battery, protecting the town from bombardment and seaborne troops. Largely British eighteenth-century work, it incorporates earlier Spanish and Moorish fragments and remains mostly intact, publicly accessible.
Line Wall Curtain is a defensive curtain wall forming part of the fortifications of the British Overseas Territory of Gibraltar. It runs from the North Bastion south along the western coast of the town to Engineer Battery, just south of the South Mole, protecting the town from bombardment from ships in the Bay of Gibraltar and from troops landing from the sea. The Line Wall Curtain, as it stands, was built by the British in the eighteenth century as part of Gibraltar’s western defences, running north–south. The wall incorporates, and is to some extent built upon, older Spanish and Moorish fragments. The earlier wall from the Moorish period incorporated square and round towers along its length, whose traces were still visible in the 1770s. It was pierced by clay pipes carrying water from a well down the slopes to supply galleys moored in the bay, and an aqueduct enclosed in its masonry ran along the wall to the Waterport reservoir. By 1836 the main defensive position in the Line Wall was King’s Bastion at the centre of the harbour, linked by the curtain to other bastions. In 1841 new white ashlar limestone walls straightened and partly relocated the Line Wall to accommodate new batteries. The wall is mostly intact, owned by the Government of Gibraltar and open to the public.
