With London fuming over whether Gibraltar should still be called a "colony," residents of the British outpost on the southern tip of Spain are more worried about life after Brexit than about which word best explains their status.
In the latest Brexit quarrel between Britain and the European Union, the government in London complained last week that the peninsula of 33,000 residents should not have been described as a "colony" in a draft EU text on visa-free travel.
Britain itself called Gibraltar a "crown colony" for 268 years — from the time when it won the area in the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, which ended the War of Spanish Succession, right up until 1981, when it came up with a new term: "dependent territory." In 2002, the official term changed again to "British overseas territory."
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