No matter how high a border barrier is built, it cannot obscure the fact that the mobility of the people on the coasts of the Mediterranean cannot be permanently restricted. Colonialisation and decolonisation were only two of the processes that preserved flexibility and movement in division of the land and islands around the Mediterranean. When Russians are colonising the holiday flats around the Spanish Mediterranean coast and Turkish and Turkish- Cypriotic identities in Famagusta are indistinguishable from one another, and Moroccan families who have lived in Central Europe for generations spend their summers in settlements they‘ve erected in Tangier or Nador, self-government and heteronomy are no longer strictly oppositional terms. The idea of British territory overseas as in Gibraltar may seem almost anachronistic, but that doesn‘t stop concrete territorial conflicts over the precise borders within the Mediterranean Sea: When Gibraltar‘s authorities erected a concrete riff off of their coast in the spring of 2013, Spain reacted with provocative increased border controls for commuters. The runway at Gibraltar Airport is located directly by the border due to the area‘s rocky terrain, and the only communication road with the Spanish mainland traverses it; the road must be closed for each landing and take-off. For days on end, the increased border controls created traffic that effectively blocked the airfield.