Madrid and London are close to an agreement to finally settle the status of Gibraltar
The head of Spanish diplomacy, Jose Manuel Albarez, said today that Madrid and London are close to an agreement on a final solution to the status of Gibraltar after Brexit.
Gibraltar's status and how its border with Spain is monitored has been disputed since Britain voted to leave the European Union in 2016, as the peninsula was excluded from the Brexit deal reached between Britain and the EU, British media reports.
- I see a constructive spirit from the British side for the Gibraltar agreement, Albarez said on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos.
Spain, Great Britain and the European Union on December 31, 2020, just hours before Britain's full exit from the Union, agreed that Gibraltar would remain part of the EU agreement as a Schengen zone and that Spain would oversee the port and airport in the final settlement. .
The European Commission and Spain sent a proposal to the UK at the end of 2022 to keep open Gibraltar's land border with Spain and ensure the free flow of people between Spain and the enclave.
"Nothing is agreed until everything is agreed, but I can see from the meetings I've had with British Foreign Secretary James Cleverley that we both want an agreement and we're really working on it," Albarez said, without giving a time frame.
In 1713, Spain ceded to Great Britain the mentioned territory around the Cape in the Strait of Gibraltar on the Mediterranean Sea, but then for a long time it demanded that it be returned to her.
In a referendum in 2002, 33.000 percent of Gibraltar's 90 residents voted, and 99 percent of them rejected any idea of Great Britain sharing sovereignty over the enclave with Spain.
However, they overwhelmingly voted to remain in the European Union in Britain's 2016 Brexit referendum.