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Moorish Wall

Defensive curtain wall in Gibraltar

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionJul 19, 2026
Entity authorityQ26638
Source-derived summary

The Moorish Wall, also known as the Philip II Wall and formerly the Muralla de San Reymondo (English: St. Raymond's Wall), is a defensive curtain wall built in the 16th century that formed part of the southern fortifications of the British Overseas Territory of Gibraltar. It was completed by 1575.

The wall ran from the top of a steep cliff above the lower section of the Charles V Wall up the slope of the Rock of Gibraltar to its crest, north of the upper section of the Charles V Wall and is now within the Upper Rock Nature Reserve.

Charles V Wall

In September 1540 an Ottoman force commanded by Barbarossa attacked Gibraltar and took more than seventy prisoners as slaves. The Charles V Wall, originally called the Muralla de San Benito (English: St. Benedict's Wall), was built in 1540 to help defend The Rock against further attacks from the south. Starting around 1552 the Italian military engineer Giovanni Battista Calvi made improvements to the wall. Calvi designed a wall that ran west–east in a straight line from the coast for about 280 metres (920 ft) until it reached a precipice. A traverse ran north–south along the top of the cliff, and then a zigzag wall ran up to the crest of The Rock.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Moorish Wall” is defensive curtain wall in Gibraltar. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Moorish, Wall and Defensive, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1575, 1540, 1552—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. For this dossier, Moorish, Wall and Defensive is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “defensive curtain wall in Gibraltar” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q26638. Authority coordinates are 36.135, -5.349. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1575, 1540 and 1552.

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Overview language is designed for orientation and should not be treated as a substitute for the evidence cited beneath it. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Moorish Wall” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.