Gibraltar parties without the fence – but is the treaty actually finished?

Red and white took over Casemates Square on Thursday as Gibraltar celebrated National Day without the old barbed-wire Verja in the way. Crowds sang Llevame donde naci’ and God Save the King, paper confetti flew, and a drone show waited for nightfall. It looked like a chapter had closed. Brussels, though, still has a vote sitting in the diary.

This was also Fabian Picardo’s last National Day as Chief Minister after 15 years. Europe’s The Final Countdown kicked off his walk onto the stage. He told the square the countdown for him had started for real, then promised he would keep turning up every 10 September anyway.

Flags, anthems and a farewell on Casemates

Gibraltarians had already filled the Rock in red and white for hours before the speeches. Picardo made a point of naming people who could not be there: residents at Mount Alvernia, patients at St Bernard’s Hospital and Calpe House, students and workers abroad, and those on shift so everyone else could celebrate. “You are not just watching National Day. You are National Day,” he said.

History sat under the party. Sixty years after Franco shut the frontier, and 59 years after the 1967 referendum, Picardo went back to that vote. His parents and grandparents, he said, backed Britain knowing phones could go dead and families could be split by a fence. “They did not vote for an easy life. They voted for the right to decide their own.”

Brexit still hangs over that story. Ninety-six per cent of Gibraltarians voted to stay in the EU in 2016. “It was not our decision to leave. It became our problem.” That problem, he added, ate a decade of government time.

Then came the line he has used for years: “Not a grain of our land. Not a drop of our water. Not a breath of our air.” He said the deal now in force on a temporary basis gives a fluid frontier and legal certainty for business, with “not a single concession” on exclusively British sovereignty. He said it five times. “Not one. Not a small one. Not a technical one. Not a hidden one. Not one.”

UK MPs were in the square this time, not just on a video link. Labour’s Amanda Martin, who chairs the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Gibraltar, led a cross-party group that also included Conservatives, Liberal Democrats and Reform. Picardo thanked them from the stage as the people “who have never let us down”.

King Charles III sent a letter praising Gibraltarians’ “strength and steadfastness” after Brexit and pointing to environmental co-operation under the new arrangement. Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s message from Downing Street included the line that landed best: “Nothing about Gibraltar without Gibraltar.” Picardo grabbed it at once. “Those five words are the whole story of the last 15 years.”

He still has one more official trip as Chief Minister to the UN Fourth Committee in New York next month. Gibraltar remains on the list of non-self-governing territories, and he said that fight is not over.

For more of his wording from this week, see Euro Weekly News’ Chief Minister’s National Day Message 2026. Readers who want the midnight scene when the fence came down in July can go back to the Gibraltar border fence falls as families and neighbours cross together.

Open frontier, unfinished paperwork

Daily life has already changed. Routine checks at the land crossing with La Linea disappeared after the UK–EU agreement on Gibraltar went into provisional application on 15 July. Shops on the Rock have since reported a jump in euro takings from Spanish day-trippers, as covered in the Gibraltar shops report, with sales rocketing after the border comes down.

‘Provisional’ is the word that matters. Formal conclusion on the EU side still needs European Parliament consent, then a Council decision. File 2026/0058(NLE) is in its preparatory phase, with an indicative plenary date of 14 December 2026.

Six Spanish MEPs, Francisco Jose Millan Mon, Antonio Lopez-Isturiz White, Gabriel Mato, Nicolas Pascual de la Parte, Juan Ignacio Zoido Alvarez and Borja Gimenez Larraz, have tabled an amendment so Parliament would refuse that consent rather than grant it. Their text does not kill the treaty on its own. It does put a political tripwire on the floor of the hemicycle.

If that amendment ever won, the Council could not conclude the agreement as planned. Past EU practice after a late “no”, SWIFT and a Morocco fisheries protocol, among them, has been to wind down provisional application once the other party is notified. That would put the open land border back under legal strain, just as the Entry/Exit System is already part of Europe’s frontier kit.

UK scrutiny is still running too. The treaty was laid at Westminster under the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act; the first 21-sitting-day objection window runs to 22 October. A useful official explainer sits in the House of Commons Library briefing, and the published text is on GOV.UK. Euro Weekly News walked through the first working day of the new rules in Gibraltar. Border changes begin today, and the airport and police chase detail in Gibraltar travellers face airport checks.

Picardo’s line to the people was that the treaty is about how Gibraltar lives next to its neighbours, not about who those neighbours are. “We are still 100 per cent British. British. British. British.” He thanked Joseph Garcia, Michael Llamas, the negotiating team and Sir Joe Bossano, who he said taught him what self-determination actually costs.

Barbed wire is gone for now. A December vote in Strasbourg will show whether that is the new normal or only a summer and autumn without the fence.