What is King's Bastion in Gibraltar?
Short answer
King's Bastion is an arrow-shaped eighteenth-century fortification on Line Wall Road, begun in 1773, which served as General Eliott's headquarters during the Great Siege. Since 2008 the restored bastion has housed the King's Bastion Leisure Centre, with Gibraltar's cinema and a bowling alley inside its walls.
Detailed answer
The bastion stands in front of the centre of the old town, over a sixteenth-century gun platform. The chief engineer, Colonel William Green, proposed new works to defend the sea wall in 1770, and work on the bastion began in 1773. The Deputy Governor, Robert Boyd, laid the first stone and named it the King's Bastion, wishing that he might live to see it resist the united efforts of France and Spain. It was built by the newly formed company of soldier artificers, forerunners of the Royal Engineers, and its casemates could house about 800 soldiers.
During the Great Siege of 1779 to 1783 the bastion was the headquarters of the Governor, General Eliott. On Friday 13 September 1782 French and Spanish floating batteries anchored about 100 yards off the bastion and attacked. The defenders fired red-hot shot, the batteries caught fire and the attack failed.
Flying chips of limestone from the gun openings wounded many soldiers in that attack. The limestone was replaced with a pink sandstone that crumbles to powder when hit, and it can still be seen on the side batteries.
On Wednesday 23 April 1783 the garrison celebrated the end of the siege. The bastion was decorated with a colonnade made from the masts and yards of the floating batteries, and Eliott was invested as a Knight of the Bath in its courtyard. Boyd died in 1794 and was buried, as he had asked, in a vault prepared when the bastion was built; a marble plaque on its north face records his burial.
In the 1870s the bastion was rebuilt to take large rifled muzzle-loading guns, including a 12.5-inch gun in an iron-armoured casemate. From the 1890s it held one of Gibraltar's first electricity generating stations, and in 1961 a power station was built against it. That building was demolished in 2005 to expose the bastion again.
The bastion reopened as a leisure centre in 2008. It holds Gibraltar's cinema and a bowling alley among other leisure facilities, and the 12.5-inch gun and two 10-inch guns were restored in their original casemates.