The great emigrations of Menorcans around the world

In the context of the War of Succession to the Spanish throne at the beginning of the 18th century (a veritable international conflagration between European powers of the time), English troops occupied the Rock of Gibraltar (1704) and the island of Menorca on behalf of Charles of Austria. (1708). Through the Treaty of Utrecht (1713), which on paper put an end to the conflict, England managed to retain under its sovereignty the two Mediterranean squares, which became two ports and fortresses of the first magnitude.

This close link between the island and the rock over a century (with some interruptions in the case of Menorca) went far beyond the obvious military and trade relationship, and also occurred in the demographic field, given that hundreds and Hundreds of Menorcans chose to go to Gibraltar for work, family and even emotional reasons, from the mid-18th century to the first third of the 19th. Since the 1730s, the dripping of artisans, priests, sailors and Koreans from the outskirts of the Castle of San Felipe and Maó has been constant, with peaks according to the vicissitudes of the island (changes of dominion and occupations), economic hardships, intermittent population booms, the periodic destruction of s’Arraval…