The Secret History of Gibraltar's Garrison Library

25 June 2026

An army officer built Gibraltar's Garrison Library in 1793, and a Neanderthal skull once lay forgotten in its cupboard. The full story.

On 3 March 1848, a fossil skull pulled from a quarry on the north face of the Rock was laid before a meeting of the Gibraltar Scientific Society. Someone wrote a label for it. The label said, in effect, that this was an ancient human who had died before the great flood of scripture. Then the skull was put away in a cupboard, and there it stayed, ignored, for the better part of two decades.

That cupboard was inside the Gibraltar Garrison Library. The skull was one of the first adult Neanderthals ever found, older than the discovery that gave the species its name, and for years the most important fossil in this story sat in a quiet reading room while the world had not yet worked out what it was looking at. This is the building that kept it, and the story of how a soldier who had lived through a four year siege came to found it.

A library imagined under fire

The Great Siege of Gibraltar ran from 1779 to 1783, a relentless attempt by Spain and France to starve and bombard the British garrison into surrender. It failed, but it was a grim education in isolation. Newspapers arrived late if they arrived at all, fresh books were a luxury, and an officer with nothing to occupy his mind had a great deal of time to fill between alarms. Among those officers was a young captain named John Drinkwater, who watched the siege closely and, crucially, kept careful notes.

Out of those notes came a remarkable book. Drinkwater's history of the late siege, first published in 1785, became the standard account of the episode and remains a primary source two and a half centuries later. It proved so popular that it ran through four editions in as many years. Having chronicled the privations of the garrison, Drinkwater had also lived the intellectual privation, and he never forgot the want of a public library on the Rock. When he set about fixing it, he was not theorising. He was solving a problem he had felt in his own long, boring, frightening nights.

A library founded by the man who wrote the siege is a rare thing: the chronicler of the hardship became the architect of its remedy.

The institution came into being on 31 July 1793, a decade after the guns fell silent. A note on the name is worth making, because it trips up even careful sources. The founder was plain John Drinkwater in 1793. He added the surname Bethune much later in life, after his wife came into an inheritance, which is why histories written long after the fact often call the founder John Drinkwater Bethune as though describing a different man. He is one man, and in 1793 he was simply Drinkwater. The library began modestly, as such things do, with reading rooms opened for the officers of the garrison and a catalogue of only a few hundred volumes. The ambition, though, was already larger than the shelves.

The building of 1800 to 1804

Within a few years the collection had outgrown its first home, and a purpose-built library was begun. Construction started in 1800 and took four years, and the building was officially opened in 1804 by the Duke of Kent, Queen Victoria's father. It was raised on the site of an earlier governors' residence dating from the period of Spanish rule, and it was conceived as a place of both study and recreation for the officers of the garrison.

Step inside today and the eighteenth-century intent is still legible. Tall windows, generous reading rooms and ranks of bound spines create the atmosphere of a gentleman's club as much as a public library, which is essentially what it was. Membership came by subscription and proprietorship rather than by public right, and for most of its life the library was run privately by a Trust. That arrangement endured for more than two centuries, until September 2011, when the library was transferred to the Government of Gibraltar. If you want the wider context of how the Rock came to be governed this way, our explainer on Gibraltar's status sets the scene.

A gentleman's club born of subscription

The club-like character was not an accident of decor. The library was built for and by the officers of the garrison, and it ran on a clear social logic. A proprietor bought his way in and then enjoyed the run of the reading rooms, the borrowing rights and, above all, the company. For a man posted to a remote fortress at the mouth of the Mediterranean, that mattered. The library was where a long tour of duty could feel, for an hour or two, connected to London and the currents of the age.

That dual function, half scholarly institution and half social club, is the key to understanding the place. It was never simply a room full of books. It was the drawing room of a society that had no other.

The skull in the cupboard

Here is the detail that lifts the Garrison Library from local landmark to scientific curiosity. The skull presented in March 1848 had been recovered from Forbes Quarry, on the north face of the Rock. It was handed over by Lieutenant Edmund Flint, the secretary of the Gibraltar Scientific Society, and we now know it to be one of the first adult Neanderthal skulls ever found. It predated the famous discovery in Germany's Neander Valley by eight years, and the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species by more than a decade.

Nobody understood what they were looking at. The significance was missed entirely. The skull was labelled as an antediluvian human and set aside, and for years it sat largely forgotten in that library cupboard while the wider world had not yet settled even on the idea of evolution. Only after Darwin reframed everything did interest revive. In 1864 the skull was brought back into the light and presented at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, where its true age began to be understood. Had it been recognised in 1848, the science of human origins might carry a Gibraltarian name rather than a German one. If the deep prehistory of the Rock intrigues you, our guide to the Forbes Quarry skull tells the full story.

For sixteen years one of the most important fossils in human history sat in a library cupboard, mislabelled as a victim of Noah's flood.

Home of the Gibraltar Chronicle

The library's intellectual life extended well beyond its shelves. It became closely tied to the Gibraltar Chronicle, a newspaper first printed in 1801 and now reckoned among the oldest English-language papers in continuous print anywhere in the world. The printing works associated with the library produced the Chronicle for generations, and the paper earned an early place in history by being among the first to report the outcome of the Battle of Trafalgar and the death of Nelson, news that reached Gibraltar before it reached London.

The editorial offices moved out in 2006 and the print works relocated in 2007, but the connection lingered, with the Chronicle's archive long kept at the library. For most of two centuries, then, this single building was at once the reading room, the social club and the news desk of the Rock. To stand in it is to stand where Gibraltar read about Trafalgar for the first time.

The gardens and the dragon tree

Outside the reading rooms lie the Garrison Library Gardens, a pocket of quiet greenery in the heart of the town. The star of the planting is a dragon tree, the slow-growing species native to the Canary Islands, thought to have reached Gibraltar through seeds carried by mariners and possibly dating back to the period of Spanish rule. It is the sort of living antique that rewards the unhurried visitor, and it makes the gardens a natural pause on any walk through old Gibraltar. After the cool of the reading rooms, the gardens are where you sit and let the place settle.

What is on the shelves today

The modern library functions as a reference and research institution. Its holdings run to around 45,000 volumes, including a great many rare and antiquarian books. The character of the collection still reflects its origins, rich in military history, travel narrative and the literature of empire, alongside an irreplaceable archive of Gibraltar's own story. It is less a place to borrow a paperback than a place to handle the printed memory of the Rock.

Fitting it into a slow culture day

The Garrison Library suits a particular kind of traveller, the one who would rather linger over one extraordinary room than tick off ten attractions. Build a morning around the old town: stroll up from Grand Casemates Square, take a quiet hour in the library and its gardens, then weave through the lanes and squares around it. Pair it with a leisurely lunch, perhaps drawn from our food and drink guide to Gibraltar, and you have a day with real texture. If your stay is short, our 48 hours in Gibraltar itinerary shows how to thread culture between the headline sights.

One practical word. The Garrison Library is a working research institution, not a museum, so do check the current opening arrangements and any tour requirements before you go. Access is not always the same as walking in off the street. A little planning means you arrive when the doors are open and the rooms are quiet, which is exactly how this place is best met.

Plan your visit to the Garrison Library

If a morning of dragon trees, antiquarian shelves and the cupboard that once hid a Neanderthal sounds like your kind of Gibraltar, base yourself somewhere that makes the slow days easy. Victory Suites sits on Devils Tower Road, about a ten minute walk from Grand Casemates Square, which means the old town and the library are a gentle stroll from your door, and you are only minutes from Gibraltar International Airport when you arrive and leave. Our more than 100 serviced apartments come with full kitchens, so you can cook after a long unhurried afternoon, plus an indoor pool and a gym for the hours you are not exploring. Our team knows the rhythm of the old town and can help you time your visit for when the reading rooms are calm, so the only thing left to decide is which rare volume to ask about first.