Billed as a “unique cultural collaboration”, today’s joint Gibraltar-La Línea Bloomsday celebrations kicked off this morning at the Alameda Gardens.

Bloomsday, which is marked worldwide, is a celebration of Irish writer James Joyce’s seminal novel Ulysses which follows a day in the life of Leopold Bloom in Dublin on 16 June 1904.

The novel’s female protagonist is Bloom’s wife, Molly Bloom, a Gibraltarian whose mother, Lunita Laredo, is a native of La Línea. Molly fondly reminisces about her childhood in Gibraltar and the Campo in the novel’s final chapter. The work contains numerous references to places such as the market, Irish Town, and the Alameda Gardens.

At the Alameda this morning, next to the Molly Bloom statue sculpted by the former Chronicle Editor Jon Searle, organiser Rebecca Calderon read from the novel’s opening pages. Representatives from the Ayuntamiento de La Línea were also in attendance.

After this, a talk by Ulysses expert Charles Durante was hosted by the BookGem bookshop, with complimentary drinks.

Mr Durante said: “Joyce took a radical decision when he chose Molly to present us with his vision of the Gibraltar of the 1880s/1890s. The official view of Gibraltar was that of a military fortress, bristling with guns, tunnels, barracks and bayonets: a truly Protestant enclave on the rim of Catholic Spain. Molly focuses on aspects of Gibraltar which never figure in the official histories—those books which, inexplicably, Joyce read, are housed in the Garrison Library.  In Molly’s monologue the Rock emerges as a richly beguiling hybrid. In this respect, [this chapter] stands in strict contrast to the English discourse on Gibraltar.”

Mr Durante also noted the subversive aspects of Joyce’s text, arguing that Molly’s Gibraltar is “full of love and budding sexuality, sensuality, colour and warmth,” adding that Molly’s version of Gibraltar “amounts to a provocative subversion of imperial British power.”

He urged people to remember that Joyce’s genius was “overwhelmingly comic and humanistic.”

This afternoon, the programme continued with a traditional Bloomsday lunch at The Clipper pub in Irish Town, featuring pie, mash and Guinness and a reading in Irish Place by local author Jackie Anderson.

Festivities will resume today from 8pm at the Museo Cruz Herrera in La Línea, where Rebecca Calderon’s sequel to her earlier Bloomsday play, “¡A Mariana No Se Le Miente!”, introduces Spanish characters in a lively new production.

Bloomsday will conclude at the Molly Bloom pub with traditional songs, music, and a pianist.

Today’s events follow the inaugural Bloomsday celebrations in 2025 during which local writer Rebecca Calderon wrote and produced an original play, “Molly’s a Llanita!” which was performed beside the Molly Bloom statue in the Alameda Gardens.