Gibraltar's Runway Crossing: The Cars Stopped in 2023, the Pedestrians Did Not

25 September 2026 Last checked 2026-09-25

At one minute past midnight on 31 March 2023 Gibraltar stopped driving cars across its runway. You can still walk across it, and in 2026 people do it every day.

At one minute past midnight on 31 March 2023, Gibraltar stopped driving cars across its runway. Almost every article written since says the famous road crossing is gone. It is not. Pedestrians, cyclists and mobility scooter users still cross an active international runway on foot, and in 2026 they still do it every day.

That is the thing worth knowing before you arrive. The tunnel changed the problem for drivers. It did not abolish the crossing, and if you walk in from Spain you are still going to stand at a barrier and wait for an aeroplane.

Why a main road ever crossed a runway

The airfield started in 1936 as an emergency strip for the Royal Navy's Fleet Air Arm. The runway was built across Winston Churchill Avenue in 1941, and then extended in 1942 and 1943 by reclaiming land from the Bay of Gibraltar with rock blasted out of the Rock itself during wartime tunnelling. By July 1943 it was 1,800 yards, about 1,600 metres, long enough for the aircraft the war required.

Today runway 09/27 is 1,776 metres of grooved asphalt, and it lies across the only flat ground Gibraltar has. There was never an alternative. The isthmus is narrow, the Rock is 426 metres of limestone immediately south of it, and the single road to Spain and the single runway had to share the same strip of sand.

Winston Churchill Avenue itself is only 1.5 km long. Once you are through customs it becomes the CA-34 on the Spanish side. That is the whole geography of the problem in two sentences.

How the crossing worked, and still works

The mechanism is a level crossing, not a traffic light. Movable barricades swing shut across the road whenever an aircraft is landing or taking off, exactly as they would for a train. Before the tunnel, the commonly cited figure was more than fifteen closures a day.

Since 31 March 2023 the runway is closed to everyday road traffic. It remains available for exceptional, specific or emergency use, and it is still open to pedestrians, cyclists, scooter riders and mobility scooter users, under the same security and safety procedure that used to apply to cars. A pedestrian subway is provided as an alternative for anyone who would rather not wait.

The tunnel took the traffic jam away. It did not take the aeroplane away.

Whose runway it actually is

The runway and aerodrome are not the airport's. They belong to the Ministry of Defence and are operated by the Royal Air Force as RAF Gibraltar, administered by British Forces Gibraltar, with the civil terminal and apron on the north side of the strip and the RAF apron and hangar on the south.

That is why crossing on foot involves a security procedure rather than a pelican button. You are walking across a military aerodrome that happens to handle ten civil movements a day, and the people who decide when the barriers move are not running a road.

The Kingsway

The replacement is a dual carriageway called the Kingsway. It runs roughly 1.2 km from a new roundabout on Devil's Tower Road to the East Gate roundabout, including about 350 metres of covered tunnel under the eastern end of the runway, and it cost 34 million pounds. The Government of Gibraltar announced the opening date in 2023 and inaugurated it that spring, fourteen years after the scheme was first announced in 2009.

It is now the only regular access route for cars, motorcycles and commercial vehicles between the frontier and Gibraltar, and the way you reach the airport terminal, the Eroski supermarket, Western Beach and Four Corners by road.

What changed and what did not

The airport is smaller than its reputation

Gibraltar handled 424,386 passengers on 3,628 flights in 2024. That is roughly ten aircraft movements a day. The terminal opened in phases, arrivals on 26 November 2011 and departures on 26 September 2012, covers 35,000 square metres and was built for 1.5 million passengers a year, so it runs at under a third of what it was designed for.

The civil airport itself opened in 1959, more than twenty years after the strip was first laid, and the terminal has always sat on the north side, the frontier side. That is the small detail that makes the walk work: you come out of arrivals already at the top of the isthmus, with the crossing and the Spanish border both a few minutes away and the town on the other side of the runway.

Scheduled routes are all to the United Kingdom: British Airways to Heathrow, easyJet to Gatwick, Manchester and Birmingham. Routes here change more often than at a large airport, so check the airport's own list rather than a guide, including this one.

The History Channel programme Most Extreme Airports put Gibraltar fifth in the world, ahead of Hong Kong's old Kai Tak and behind Princess Juliana on Sint Maarten. It is a television ranking rather than a safety assessment, and the things that earned it the place, a runway into the sea and a road across the middle, are exactly the things that make it interesting rather than dangerous.

The door built for a terminal that never came

The 2012 terminal was designed with provision for passengers arriving or departing through Spain, because the 2006 Cordoba Accord envisaged a matching Spanish terminal on the La Linea side. Spain cancelled that building in the austerity round of 2010 and never put it back in a budget. The Gibraltar side was built for a handshake that did not happen.

The answer finally arrived in a different shape. Since 15 July 2026, anyone entering Gibraltar from outside the Schengen area, including from the United Kingdom, goes through two checks at the airport: a Gibraltar entry control, and a Schengen entry control carried out by Spanish officers working inside a joint facility attached to the terminal. Locally it is called the Schengen shack. Those officers are confined to that facility and do not operate elsewhere in Gibraltar.

The same treaty is why the land frontier has no routine passport checks at all any more, which we covered in our guide to the 15 July 2026 border changes. The checks did not disappear. They moved to the airport and the port.

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The forty year argument you are standing in

The crossing looks like a quirk. It is the visible end of a long dispute about whether the isthmus the runway sits on was ceded to Britain by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. Spain says it was not.

That argument had real consequences for anyone trying to fly here. A Joint Declaration by the two foreign ministers on 2 December 1987 set up joint civil use of the airport, Gibraltar refused to implement it, and the practical result was that most European aviation legislation was suspended in its application to Gibraltar airport for the best part of two decades.

The Cordoba Accord of 18 September 2006 ended the discriminatory restrictions, including the ban on flights crossing Spanish soil, and brought the airport back inside the European air transport framework. When the Partido Popular returned to government in Madrid in 2011 it pressed to go back to the pre 2006 position, which Britain would not accept. The 2026 treaty is the settlement that argument finally reached.

If you are flying in, plan for two things

The first is the double check. Allow noticeably longer on arrival than you would have done in 2025, because a Gibraltar control and a Schengen control are two queues, not one, and the joint facility is a temporary arrangement rather than a purpose built hall.

The second is the wind. An easterly coming through the Strait hits 426 metres of limestone right beside the runway and breaks into turbulence on the approach. Pilots go around, and when conditions do not improve the flight diverts to Malaga, where the airline normally puts passengers on a coach for the couple of hours back. This is routine here, not a crisis, but it is a reason not to book anything tight for your arrival evening.

If it happens to you, the practical answer is the same one locals give: take the coach, do not try to rearrange flights, and tell your accommodation you are coming late.

Watching a landing without being a nuisance

The crossing itself is the obvious spot, and standing at the barrier while a jet rolls past is genuinely the reason some people come. Do not linger in the crossing once the barriers lift, because the people behind you are commuting.

Eastern Beach gives you the approach end from the side, and Devil's Tower Road runs along the flank of the strip. For the other kind of aerial view, the Mediterranean Steps put you 400 metres above the whole isthmus, and on a clear afternoon you can watch an aircraft come in over the bay from up there.

The part nobody tells visitors

For pedestrians, the runway route is still the shorter way into town from the frontier. That is the reason it survived. Gibraltar could have closed it to everyone in 2023 and pushed every arriving walker into the subway, and it did not, because thousands of people cross that frontier daily on foot and minutes matter to them.

With a suitcase it is still the sensible route. The crossing is flat, paved and short, and the wait at the barrier is measured in minutes, not the open ended frontier queue that used to shape every plan made here before July 2026.

It also means the single most photographed thing in Gibraltar is a commuter route. The queue at the barrier is mostly people going to work.

Staying on the Gibraltar side puts you the right side of all of it. Victory Suites runs 100+ apartments in Gibraltar, a short walk from the frontier and the airport, which matters when your flight lands late or diverts and you just want to reach a bed without a border in between. Book direct with us, or message the team with your flight number and we will tell you what the wind is doing on the day.