The Bay of Gibraltar has always felt busy, even if you’re standing nowhere near a ship. Over time, it has swallowed everything from Phoenician and Roman vessels to British, Spanish, Venetian and Dutch ships—plus the odd aeroplane.
Now, Spanish archaeologists have pulled more of that history into daylight. Working in the bay between the southern port of Algeciras and the Rock of Gibraltar, researchers from the University of Cádiz and the University of Granada have documented the wrecks of more than 30 ships dating from the fifth century BC to the second world war. The effort is part of Project Herakles, a three-year project that has identified 151 archaeological sites in the bay—134 of them shipwrecks. To date, the team has documented 34 of those wrecks, with another layer of finds still waiting in the sediment.
On one recent dig, a suction hose did most of the work, tugging sediment away from a wreck in the Bay of Algeciras. The moment is mundane in a way—water, sand, equipment—but the material it exposes is anything but. The oldest wreck is a Punic era ship dating to the fifth century BC. Beyond that, the list includes 23 Roman ships, two late Roman ships, four medieval ships and 24 vessels from the early modern period.
Put together, the sunken items form a messy, fascinating timeline—war and trade, exploration and settlement—around one of the world’s most strategically important waterways. Felipe Cerezo Andreo, a professor of archaeology at the University of Cádiz who led the investigation, described the area as a watery crossroads. “It’s one of those bottlenecks through which ships have always had to pass, whether on commercial shipping routes, voyages of discovery, or due to armed conflicts,” Misryoum newsroom reports he said.
What makes the bay stand out, Misryoum editorial desk noted, is not only the number of wrecks but their variety—different cultures and different national fleets converging in a relatively small stretch of water. Cerezo said there are few Mediterranean places with this kind of concentration and such a significant variety of archaeological remains. He pointed to Dutch, Venetian, Spanish, and English ships—“ships of practically every nationality”—because they all passed through the strait, whether heading out to the Atlantic for trade or entering the Mediterranean from northern Europe and other regions.
The team is especially excited about three medieval vessels that may help clarify seafaring during the late period of Islamic rule in southern Spain. And even where the finds don’t sound dramatic, they can still change what archaeologists think about maritime life. Misryoum newsroom reported that one of the most intriguing discoveries is the wreck of the Puente Mayorga IV, a small late 18th-century Spanish gunboat of a type used for rapid, stealthy attacks on British ships of the line around Gibraltar. These attack craft, Cerezo explained, would sometimes disguise themselves as fishing boats before flinging off their netting and firing their prow-mounted cannon at their enemies.
In the wreck, researchers came across what looked at first like a miraculously preserved book. Actually, it was a book-shaped wooden box with a hollow space inside. Cerezo initially wondered if it could hide documents, maybe even tied to espionage. “Was the officer who carried it mapping the position of an enemy vessel?” Misryoum newsroom reported that after careful examination, the box turned out to contain a pair of wooden combs—suggesting he may have been more focused on grooming than spying.
There’s also a practical urgency behind all this. Misryoum analysis indicates the researchers want the Andalucían regional government and Spain’s culture ministry to preserve and protect the sites, which face pressure from port development, dredging and dock construction. And climate change is already showing up in the bay’s archaeology: rising sea levels are altering sediment layers and exposing archaeological sites, while an invasive algae grows over rocks and wrecks alike.
To bring the underwater world closer to people who can’t dive, the team has created virtual models and 360-degree videos shared with the public online and in local museums and town halls. Cerezo said they bring “these goggles” for a kind of dryland diving experience—because while people sometimes imagine wrecked treasures like the Unicorn in Tintin, the sites aren’t that neatly preserved. Still, the point is simple: if people see what’s there, they may push
harder to protect it. “What we have here is a very small space that allows us to analyse the evolution of maritime history throughout practically the whole of the Iberian peninsula and north Africa,” Misryoum editorial desk noted him saying. And in that context, the bay becomes less a collection of wrecks and more a record of how coastal societies lived with the sea—sometimes intimately, sometimes violently—and how much of that story could be lost
if the shoreline keeps changing. Actually, it’s not just lost—it’s rewritten, with the sediment layers, the algae, and the port machinery all working at once…
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