On her sixth attempt, Mercedes Gleitze was the first known person to swim across the Strait of Gibraltar on April 6, 1928. It took her 12 hours and 50 minutes to cross the stretch of water.
The Strait of Gibraltar is a narrow strait that connects the Atlantic to the Mediterranean and separates Europe from Africa. The two continents are separated by 8.9 miles at the narrowest point. Dozens of ferries cross the Strait everyday, mainly between Tangier in Morocco and the Spanish port of Algeciras. Algeciras is now the ferry port for Gibraltar as ferries no longer call at Gibraltar.
It is today that we will board one of these ferries to cross over to Spain. But first we need to get to the port, which is about a 2 1/2 hour drive from Chefchaouen.
Our driver picked us up at our hotel at about 8:00 for our 12:00 ferry, and then arrived early at the port at around 10:00. The Tanger Med port on Morocco’s north coast is Africa’s largest and it is huge.
They ask you to show up two hours but no less than one hour before departure. We were two hours before but it only took us about 5 minutes to checkin and get through passport control for the exit.
And then unfortunately our ferry was delayed by 60 minutes so we sat around waiting for that.
We finally got underway at about 13:00 for the 90 minute crossing.
It was a beautiful day to cross the Strait and we arrived in Algeciras, went through Euro passport control and got to the curb within minutes.
Grabbed a taxi and were on our way to Gibraltar – late but still had some sunlight to maybe get to the top of the Rock!
