Winston Churchill Avenue, Gibraltar
Description
The northern end of the road starts at Gibraltar's border with Spain and is bifurcated by Gibraltar International Airport at Victoria Stadium, which is Gibraltar's major sporting venue. The road intersects the airport's runway at surface level; movable barricades close when aircraft land or take off. In 2009, the Government of Gibraltar announced that a new highway will be built in order to avoid motor vehicles crossing the runway, which caused congestion. On 31 March 2023, the new road, a dual carriageway named The Kingsway links the customs checkpoint with Devil's Tower Road, crossing the east end of the airport runway underground, through a 350-metre tunnel. Runway access is now closed to everyday road traffic but is still available for exceptional, specific, or emergency use as well as pedestrians, cyclists and mobility scooters although an alternative subway is provided.
Operation Flavius
In 1988, the then-Shell petrol station located on the road was the scene of a controversial British military operation known as Operation Flavius. On 6 March, a Special Air Service (SAS) group shot dead three members of a Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) team, made up of Danny McCann, Seán Savage and Mairéad Farrell while they were making their way to Spain on foot. The three were suspected of planning to kill members of a British military band with a car bomb outside the Governor of Gibraltar's official residence, The Convent. At the subsequent inquest into the deaths, members of the SAS team stated that they believed that the three were armed and that they were capable of remotely detonating the suspected bomb. The legality of the deaths was challenged in the European Court of Human Rights (see McCann and Others v United Kingdom), but it was eventually ruled that the killings were lawful.