Admiralty Tunnel is a tunnel in

Gibraltar Gibraltar ( , ) is a British Overseas Territories, British Overseas Territory and British overseas cities, city located at the southern tip of the Iberian Peninsula, on the Bay of Gibraltar, near the exit of the Mediterranean Sea into the A ...

.Eley, Colonel D.M. (1957). ''The Gibraltar Tunnels''. The tunnel was used for the purpose of bringing stone from the east side. During the Second World War the tunnel contained an operations centre where

Dwight Eisenhower Dwight David "Ike" Eisenhower (born David Dwight Eisenhower; October 14, 1890 – March 28, 1969) was the 34th president of the United States, serving from 1953 to 1961. During World War II, he was Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionar ...

planned

Operation Torch Operation Torch (8–16 November 1942) was an Allies of World War II, Allied invasion of French North Africa during the Second World War. Torch was a compromise operation that met the British objective of securing victory in North Africa whil ...

. , the operations centre is used to house a secure data facility.

History

The new navy base was begun in 1893, but for some time the stone was brought by barge from the east side of the rock to Gibraltar Harbour on the west side. The tunnel allowed stone from the quarries on the east side to be brought via a one-metre

narrow gauge railway A narrow-gauge railway (narrow-gauge railroad in the US) is a railway with a track gauge (distance between the rails) narrower than . Most narrow-gauge railways are between and . Since narrow-gauge railways are usually built with Minimum railw ...

to help construct the navy base on the west side. The Royal Navy during the Second World War A24599

It is the only tunnel that runs from east to the west of the

Rock of Gibraltar The Rock of Gibraltar (from the Arabic name Jabal Ṭāriq , meaning "Mountain of Tariq ibn Ziyad, Tariq") is a monolithic limestone mountain high dominating the western entrance to the Mediterranean Sea. It is situated near the end of a nar ...

, and during World War II the tunnel was reworked and a 3,000-square-metre area roughly halfway down it became a state-of-the-art communications centre. This Allied Command Headquarters centre was protected from enemy bombs by metres of rock in every direction and contained the board room where the invasion of North Africa (

) was planned by Dwight Eisenhower. As a result, Eisenhower not only commanded the operation, but he was the first non-British person to command Gibraltar in 200 years. It had its own systems for fresh air, electricity, lighting and communication links to the outside world. The space now contains a very secure data storage facility previously owned by Vault Technology Services and now operated by ''Continent 8''.Directions to ...
Continent 8 Technologies - Gibraltar, accessed April 2013 The size of the data storage facility is , which is split up into 80 separate rooms. It is not open to the public but it is possible to see from one end to the other and thus to observe how straight the tunnel is. The west end of the tunnel is accessible from Queensway.

References

{{Streets in Gibraltar Tunnels in Gibraltar