Introduction
The aim of the Gibaltar.cat portal, which went live in the summer of 2021, is for it to be a repository of all the research into the links between the Catalan Countries and Gibraltar that I, Martí Crespo (Barcelona, 1972), have carried out over the last few decades as a journalist, linguist and researcher. The main intention is to highlight the significant contribution of Catalans, Menorcans and Valencians to the history of Gibraltar and, in particular, to the creation of today’s Yanito identity.
Since around the year 2000, I have been researching all kinds of historical, cultural, social and political aspects of the relationship between these two territories of the Iberian Peninsula, and some of those studies have found their way into articles, reports and papers delivered at conferences. A result of all that research was also the book Els ‘minorkeens’ de Gibraltar (PAMSA, 2018), which focuses specifically on the Menorcan community established in Gibraltar since the 18th Century. The English version is available here (introduction here).
All those articles will thus be available on the internet (mostly published in Catalan) together with many other (unpublished) originals. I have also added some transcriptions of documents which I think are of great interest but which, for the time being, cannot be found in digital version. One example of that is the extremely important and very interesting diary of the allied occupation of Gibraltar in 1704 and the subsequent Spanish-French start-up in 1705, written in exile by the Austrian Francesc de Casamitjana.
Gibaltar.cat is a portal that is constantly being updated and articles and documents will be uploaded to it from time to time. For enquiries, information or comments, please contact gibralcat [at] gmail.com.
The content of Gibaltar.cat is in Catalan. The site will offer some of it translated professionally into English or Spanish, but the option to automatically translate other pages into English or Spanish is also available from sites and platforms such as Apertium.org, Opentrad.com and Google Translate.
Articles in English
Swim to freedom
The republican Dr. Francesc Dalmau i Norat escaped from a Francoist disciplinary battalion in 1940 by swimming at night from Los Barrios to the Rock
Surnames of Menorcan origin in Gibraltar
An introduction to surnames brought to the Rock by Menorcans in the 18th and 19th Centuries
The Great Siege… with a Minorcan emphasis
A personal diary of the Great Siege written by a Minorcan priest. Translated into English by Manolo Galliano
Introduction to the English language version of my book
The English translation of my book (August 2021) about the Menorcan community in Gibraltar deserves a proper introduction