"We have reached [in the last six weeks] important agreements on Gibraltar with the European Commission and with the United Kingdom. Agreements that make us think that we are very close to achieving a historic milestone on this issue," said Sánchez, in a statement at the plenary session of the Spanish parliament.

"Negotiations between the parties continue and I am confident of a comprehensive agreement in the coming weeks," he added.

On the content of the agreements, he only said that they will bring "more legal certainty, more economic opportunities and more daily facilities" to those who live in Campo de Gibraltar, the Spanish territory that borders the British enclave of Gibraltar, in southern Spain.

These negotiations aim to define the relationship and Gibraltar with the European Union (EU), following Brexit, the UK's exit from the European bloc, approved in a 2016 referendum.

Gibraltar - whose sovereignty is claimed by Spain - is not included in the trade and cooperation pact that London and Brussels reached at the end of 2020, so a separate agreement needs to be reached.

There have already been around 20 rounds of negotiations between the EU and the UK on Gibraltar since Brexit.

In recent weeks, the Foreign Ministers (MNE) of Spain and the United Kingdom (José Manuel Albares and David Cameron) and Commissioner Maros Sefcovic, who leads, in the European Commission, the EU's global negotiations with the London Government for the new relationship between the two parties following Brexit, met twice in Brussels.

According to joint statements from all parties after these meetings, there has been progress in the negotiations, with agreements on "general political lines, including on the airport, goods and mobility".

In November 2022, Spain and the European Commission proposed to the United Kingdom the creation of a "shared prosperity zone" in the Spanish region of Campo de Gibraltar, which includes the elimination of the Gibraltar fence (physical border), according to what the Government of Madrid revealed at the time.

270 thousand people live in Campo de Gibraltar and many of them cross the border daily to work in Gibraltar, in the British territory.

According to a statement from the Spanish MNE in November 2022, the objective of eliminating the physical border is to favour the mobility of people and goods and create a "shared prosperity zone".

"This requires that Spain begin to control, on behalf of Schengen, the external borders of Gibraltar," added the same note.

The "Gibraltar Fence" or simply "the Fence" is the name used for the international border line in Gibraltar, just over one kilometre long, physically marked, with fences and a border post, and which requires a control of people and goods to be crossed.

According to the statement from the Spanish Government in 2022, the proposal, in relation to customs issues, is "to guarantee the free movement of goods between the EU and Gibraltar, without this increasing the risks to the internal market" of the community bloc, in particular at the level of unfair competition or "of illicit trafficking, such as, for example, tobacco".

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