Moorish Castle, Killing Fields: Gibraltar's Wrong Kind of Return

There is a tower on the Rock that has been watching the Mediterranean for seven hundred years.

The Moorish Castle in Gibraltar — its Tower of Homage rising from the limestone in that particular shade of sun-beaten ochre that only the southern edge of Europe seems to produce — has just reopened after major restoration work. You can walk into it now. You can stand where Nasrid governors stood and see what they saw: the strait, the African coast, the place where two seas decide to become one. It is one of the genuinely extraordinary survivals of the medieval Islamic world in Europe, and it deserves your attention, your presence, and probably a long silence.

I have been thinking about that tower all evening, because the same small stretch of Mediterranean water that it overlooks has been governed this week by a different kind of authority — the kind that counts birds, not battlements.

Malta's turtle dove hunting season has closed. Not at its scheduled end. Early. The 500-bird bag limit — the number agreed under the derogation that allows spring and autumn hunting seasons here while most of the EU has long since stopped — was reached before the season ran its course. Five hundred turtle doves. Shot. Done. Season over.

I want to be careful here, because I have made a rule for myself: I do not write about hunting as culture war. Malta's hunting traditions are old and real and carry their own complicated weight, the same weight I bring to rabbit stew cooked the way my mother's family cooked it, to lampuki season, to the particular seriousness with which this island treats the sea and everything that comes from it. Food and the pursuit of food are not frivolous things. I hold that position.

But five hundred turtle doves is not a number that sits quietly. *Streptopelia turtur* — the turtle dove, the bird of Song of Songs, the one whose call is the sound of summer arriving across the whole of human literary history — has lost more than 90% of its European population since 1980. It is red-listed. It is disappearing at a rate that conservation biologists describe with the same vocabulary they reserve for genuine emergency. And Malta, because of its geographical position on the central Mediterranean flyway, is where an enormous proportion of what remains passes twice a year, in spring and in autumn, resting and feeding before the crossing.

The derogation exists. It is legal. The limit was observed — the season closed when the number was reached, which is precisely what the system is designed to do. I am not accusing anyone of lawbreaking. I am sitting with the number, and the number is uncomfortable, and I think it should be.

What strikes me about the Gibraltar tower and the turtle dove season, taken together on the same September evening, is that both are stories about what we choose to preserve. The Moorish Castle stood derelict for years. Someone decided it was worth restoring. Someone counted what it cost and decided the answer was yes. Now visitors can climb the Tower of Homage and stand inside seven hundred years of history that survived conquest, siege, colonial administration, and two world wars.

The turtle dove has survived, so far, everything the planet has thrown at it. It made it through the Holocene, through the medieval period when Gibraltar's tower was being built, through the industrial revolution, through the 20th century. What it is not surviving, with any particular confidence, is us — and our difficulty in sitting with the difference between a tradition and a tradition that has outlived the conditions that sustained it.

The China Cultural Centre in Valletta announced this week that it will begin offering Mandarin language courses from October. Beginners' classes. Advanced learners. I mention this not as a digression but as a counterpoint, because language courses are also a form of preservation — the decision that something worth knowing should be passed on, that the transmission matters. We are, as a species, extremely good at deciding what to save and what to let pass. The question is always which instinct we follow and why.

I keep returning to the tower. To what it means that someone climbed scaffolding for months or years to restore the stonework of a building that the people who built it would never have expected to survive. To the kind of faith that restoration requires — the belief that the future deserves to inherit what the past made.

Seven hundred years from now, if anyone is standing where we are standing, what will they be grateful we kept?

Go cook something that migrated. A dish that arrived from somewhere else and stayed. Maltese stuffat tal-fe