Gibraltar is Spanish, not British, the wife of former deputy prime minister Sir Nick Clegg has said.
Miriam González Durántez made the remarks while she was promoting Democracia 21, the party she has started ahead of Spain’s upcoming general election.
Speaking to Spanish current affairs programme En boca de todos, Ms González Durántez was asked whether Gibraltar was Spanish. She replied: “Yes, of course”.
Asked whether her husband agrees with her, she said: "We try not to talk about Gibraltar. He will defend his position and I defend mine.”
She added: "Women don’t think the same as their husbands; we have minds of our own”.
Ms González Durántez started her new party as an attempt to offer an alternative to Spain’s current system which is dominated by two political parties – the governing Socialists and the conservative People’s Party.
Gibraltar was ceded to Britain in 1713, but Spain has maintained its sovereignty claim ever since.
The contested British Overseas Territory of 38,000 people is perched at the southern tip of the Iberian Peninsula, located just miles from Morocco at a point where the Atlantic Ocean meets the Mediterranean Sea.
Over the summer, a physical border between Gibraltar and Spain was removed following Britain’s exit from the EU, making life easier for the thousands who travel between the two every day.
The move allows a new freedom of movement under a historic European Union-UK treaty that came after years of post-Brexit wrangling. The UK’s Foreign Office minister Stephen Doughty said that the agreement secured Gibraltar’s long-term economic future and interests.
In Britain’s 2016 Brexit referendum, 96 per cent of voters in Gibraltar supported remaining in the EU. But when Britain finally left the bloc in 2020, the relationship between Gibraltar and the EU had been left unresolved.
Previous talks on a deal to ensure people and goods could keep flowing across the border had made halting progress. In 2025, the EU and UK announced an agreement on those issues, with the two sides and Gibraltar’s government signing a treaty on Tuesday that eases border crossings.
Without a deal, Gibraltar could have a faced a hard land border with full passport checks, posing economic risks for the territory deeply dependent on some 15,000 Spaniards – almost half of Gibraltar’s workforce – who cross the frontier every day for work.
Travelers to Gibraltar from countries outside the Schengen area will have to contend with the EU Entry-Exit System, or EES, that was rolled out in Europe in April and replaced passport stamps with biometric data collected through photographs and digital fingerprints.
