During the Civil War, some Republicans managed to reach Gibraltar, between 5,000 and 8,000, before the fence was closed and the British-controlled zone expanded to the isthmus separating Spain from Great Britain, where the current Gibraltar International Airport is located. They undoubtedly took advantage of a questionable policy of self-defense to expand the British colony.

Well, let’s consider that among those 5,000 to 8,000 Republicans who entered Gibraltar, there was a married couple with a 10-year-old girl, who was baptized and born Margarita Sánchez Salazar. This family and the girl were trapped, and must have lived their entire lives in Gibraltar and, by extension, London, but never in any Spanish city or town. The British authorities granted British nationality to Margarita Sánchez Salazar, who would henceforth be known as Margaret Court. This girl speaks English, the result of a British education, and Spanish, as it is her parents’ native language.

Margarita Sánchez Salazar or Margaret Court, once the border fence was opened by the Spanish authorities, sees an opportunity to return to her hometown, even though her parents had died a few years earlier, and regain Spanish nationality for herself and her children. But how does she do this, having lost any Spanish documentation that proves it?

Desperate, she went to an immigration lawyer, who suggests that, since she is originally Spanish, she should never have lost her nationality, neither for herself nor for her descendants. He suggests that there is a means of proof: birth certificates, both as a Spanish and British citizen.

She decided to go the Civil Registry in La Línea de la Concepción, and with her old, ancient ID card that she still had from the 1940s, decides to make an appointment at the police station in La Línea de la Concepción to obtain a Spanish passport and ID card. But not before recovering her birth certificate from the Civil Registry in La Línea de la Concepción, which the officials proceed to hand over to her spanish nationality..

Once such status was recognized, that of Spanish, and which should never have been lost, her children, Ana and Sancho, proceeded to process, the nationality of origin,and after a brief process, they obtained the Spanish nationality of origin, and so it was, as a historical anomaly, it came to a successful end, not without before, an interval of 46 years.