Name: Why Europe STILL Has Cities in Africa
Uploaded: 2026-02-18T17:19:12.000Z
Duration: 32 min 53 s
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This is Morocco, a country that generally looks pretty normal on most world maps until you zoom in way closer on the country's north coast, where you'll notice these two weird little enclaves that aren't actually a part of Morocco, but

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are pockets of Spain and the European Union instead.

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These two pockets are known as Ceuta and Melilla, respectively.

They are the only two pockets of European controlled territory that still remain on the African continent today, making up the European Union's only physical land borders in Africa.

And and they are way, way, way more controversial and contentious than you probably know.

Combined, the two territories are geographically small at only about 31 square kilometers, about the same size as the Special Administrative Region of Macau in China.

But like Macau, they are very densely populated, with Ceuta having an estimated population of about 85,000 people and Melilla having one of about 86,000 people.

Today they together have more than 171,000 people.

Between them are all citizens of both Spain and the eu.

Despite living on a continent that is distinctly not Europe and only sharing a border with Morocco, life in both cities for the most part feels very Spanish and European.

The architecture, culture, food and spoken language all seem pretty much the same as most anywhere else in southern Spain does, until you get out to their edges and you encounter their gigantic border walls that physically isolate them from Morocco and the rest of Africa.

Stretching across their entire land borders with Morocco, the walls consist of parallel double fences that soar 6 meters or 20ft high that historically have been topped with barbed wire, complete with regular guard towers and patrols of thousands of Spanish border guards.

Beneath the ground, a vast network of cables connect floodlights, motion and noise sensors and 24 hour video cameras to a central command station.

While dozens of Spanish coast guard vessels constantly patrol the coasts.

A large, coordinated and complicated system that is explicitly designed to keep people out of them from the other side in Africa.

The walls effectively make both Ceuta and Melilla, isolated islands of the EU and Spain in Africa.

And if you look more closely at their borders in Google Maps, you'll notice that they both appear as dashed, which symbolizes them as being disputed because Morocco claims both of them in their entirety and has disputed their ownership with Spain for decades now.

On the surface of it, you might be more inclined to side with Morocco's stance on the dispute.

Morocco asserts that these two cities are the final living remnants of European colonialism in Africa today, and

that they therefore should be surrendered to them, while Spain asserts that they are both core integral territories of Spain just as much as anywhere else in The Spanish and European mainland are.

And caught in between the crossfire of this geopolitical dispute over the past several years have been thousands of migrants from all around the world who have been treated by both sides as effectively sacrificial, disposable pawns in their own great game, which has led to hundreds of deaths at these heavily fortified borders over just the past few years that have made them not only the deadliest borders anywhere in the eu, but, but

among the most blood soaked borders anywhere on the earth during the entire 21st century.

And yet, somehow, these disputed and deadly borders at the frontiers of Europe and Africa have attracted very little international attention.

And if you'd like to understand what's going on here today, like I did when I first heard about them, you need to understand the history that got us here to this strange point.

Today, Ceuta, in particular, is one of the two key strategic locations to control, along with Gibraltar, in order to dominate access through the nearby narrow Strait of Gibraltar.

The only natural passageway between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic.

Ceuta is a winding, narrow peninsula that juts out from the African mainland, which also makes it a highly defensible position from the rest of Africa.

In the 8th century AD, Ceuta was used as the launch pad for the Muslim conquest of the Iberian peninsula that would last for the next 800 years.

During the Reconquista, when the Christian kingdoms of Iberia were pushing the Muslims out, the Portuguese advanced across the Strait of Gibraltar to seize and conquer Ceuta in 1415, marking the very start of modern European expansion into Africa that would reach its apex centuries later, when nearly the entire continent would be conquered.

Decades later, the final Muslim stronghold in Iberia, at Granada, was conquered by the Spanish in 1492, and

Seeking to establish a forward defensive outpost to keep the Strait of Gibraltar secure and to prevent Muslim powers in North Africa from regrouping, the Spanish sailed across the Mediterranean and conquered their own exclave around Melilla.

Then, about a century later, between 1580 and 1640, Portugal and Spain entered into the Iberian Union together, during which Ceuda ostensibly remained a part of Portugal, but

was subordinated under Spanish leadership.

Across this time period, Ceuda attracted a lot of new residents of Spanish origin.

So by the time when the Iberian Union collapsed in 1640, Ceuta had become more demographically Spanish than it had been Portuguese.

And so it became the only Portuguese territory that sided with Spain in the aftermath.

In 1668, Portugal finally formally recognized the allegiance of Ceuda to Spain and agreed to Cede the city to the Spanish through the 1668 Treaty of Lisbon.

For centuries, both Ceuta and Melilla were generally treated by the Spanish as frontier military forts and or penal colonies, posts to defend the Spanish mainland from Barbary piracy and possible attacks coming from North Africa and also dumping grounds for Spain's most undesirable prisoners and outcasts to remove them away from the mainland.

For centuries, the Arabs and the Berbers in North Africa also attempted to reconquer both Ceuta and Melilla through multiple sieges, including the longest continuous siege of a city in all of history, when Ceuto was placed under siege for 33 straight years between 1694 and 1727, though none were ever actually successful in driving the Spanish out.

Much later, in 1859, further disagreements over the borders between Ceuda and Melilla and the Kingdom of Morocco led to a devastating war that resulted in thousands of deaths and ended in a decisive Spanish military victory, which was enough to fight forced Morocco into signing the Treaty of Wad Rus in 1860 that for the first time extended Morocco's formal recognition of Spain's sovereignty over both Ceuta and Melilla and set their current borders as we know them today.

As the European scramble for Africa continued across the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Morocco eventually yielded to the unbearable colonial pressures that were being placed upon it in 1912, when it agreed under duress to become divided between a new French protectorate and a new smaller Spanish protectorate.

These two protectorates placed over Morocco in Spain's previously acquired territories in Ceuta and Melilla were never co mingled together.

They never became a part of Spain's colonial protectorate in Morocco and were always considered by the Spanish to be separate integral territories of Spain itself.

Decades later, in 1956, when the protectorate was dissolved and Morocco regained their independence from both France and Spain again, Spain continued holding onto its control over both Ceuda and Melilla, based on their argument that they had never been a part of the Moroccan protectorate and that they had been directly controlled by Spain for centuries.

Well before the 19th century era of European colonialism in Africa had even begun, Spain argued and continues to argue that Ceyuna and Melilla are not the result of European colonialism in Africa, but

are instead historically integral territories of Spain that have been a part of the country for about the same length of time as cities like Granada have been on the Spanish mainland for more than a half millennium now.

Morocco, on the other hand, immediately disagreed with this position after their 1956 independence and despite previous treaties they had agreed to with Spain that recognized Spanish sovereignty over them, like the 1860 Treaty of Juan Ross, the modern post independent state of Morocco insisted and continues to insist that both Ceuta and Melilla are actually products of European colonialism in Africa.

And based on that, Morocco has insisted that Spain's continued control over them is illegitimate today.

Morocco has instead maintained their own territorial claims to both of them and has for decades now demanded that Spain fully cede and transfer them both, over which Spain has kept on refusing to do the gist of the modern territorial dispute between them that continues to this day.

I think it's also rather interesting to point out here that Spain basically maintains opposite hypocritical legal arguments for why they should be able to maintain Ceuda and Malia, but

also why the UK should return Gibraltar back to them on the opposite side of the Strait from Ceuta.

The British conquered Gibraltar from Spain centuries ago, back in 1704, and have controlled it ever since.

Spain currently argues that the continued presence of the British in Gibraltar is an illegitimate legacy of British imperialism that interrupts with our own territorial contiguity and therefore that the UK should return the territory back to Spain again.

Well, Bernan insists that the territory is an integral part of the UK that has been British for centuries now, and

that almost everybody who lives there are British citizens who have no desire to join with Spain, which is all basically an exact mirror of Spain and Morocco's disputes on the other side of the strait over Ceuta and Melilla in North Africa.

In both instances, Spain takes precisely opposite legal arguments whenever it conveniently benefits them more, which I thought was a silly but worthy tangent to throw in here.

As it's proven over the decades, however, Spain's continued control over Ceuta and Melilla have never ended up becoming as controversial as other contentious borders drawn up by Europeans in the Arab world did.

Their control over these cities doesn't really harm Spanish relations with anybody else in the greater Arab world beyond Morocco.

While Spain could never conceivably agree to just give up these territories to Morocco, where roughly 170,000 of their own citizens currently live, the people of both cities shown in poll after poll over the years, overwhelmingly would rather remain a part of Spain and the EU and all of the benefits that entails, rather than becoming a part of Morocco under most international conventions, transferring over the cities to Moroccan control would require hosting a referendum in them, which, as you can imagine, would never possibly be successful right now.

And Morocco also knows full and well that an outright invasion of the territories would spark a massive international crisis that would almost certainly lose as well.

While neither Ceuta nor Melilla are considered to be legally under NATO's protection, since they're physically located beyond Europe, Spain itself is very capable of defending them all on their own.

Ceuta in particular is only located 17 km away from the Spanish mainland and is located relatively nearby to the primary Spanish naval base at Rota, as well as the Spanish Air Force's key air base at Moron.

Spain can very easily and very effectively project naval and air power into both Ceuta and Melilla to defend them if need be.

And with a military budget well more than double the size of Morocco's and the likely backing of the rest of the eu, Morocco knows that they would be hopelessly outclassed if they ever attempted to take the cities through force, which is why they never try to do that and why they've resorted to covert hybrid warfare operations against them instead.

Initially, upon Morocco's independence, Spain granted Moroccans the right to travel back and forth between Melilla and Ceuta for work and travel relatively freely.

And the issue of Morocco's claim to both of the territories more or less faded away into the background of international affairs until the 1990s when Spain joined the EU in the Nishingen area, which enabled passport free travel between them after neighboring Algeria collapsed into a devastating civil war throughout the 1990s.

Around the same time, a new surge of migration began of refugees fleeing that war across the border towards Melilla, which at only 70 km away from the Algerian border, was easily the closest EU territory to the country and the easiest pathway for refugees to take into the rest of Europe through the Schengen area.

Spain then quickly began receiving pressure from Brussels to cut down on the flows of migrants that were entering into the EU through Melilla.

And so, beginning in 1996, Spain started the construction of what was initially a 3 meter high chain link double fence across just 7 miles of the Melilla border.

By 1998, the first phase of the modern wall around the exclaves was finished.

But because of Melilla's rough, hilly topography, the fence wasn't constructed along the exactly agreed upon border with Morocco.

Instead, it was constructed along an approximation of the border, meaning that in a few instances, some of the Spanish residents of melilla in the 90s suddenly found their homes on the wrong side of the fence facing towards Morocco, exposed since then, as the pace of migration into Ceuta and Melilla from sub Saharan Africa and the Middle east has increased, as the pathways into the EU they represent have become more desirable, especially as a way to avoid the much more dangerous way of crossing over the Mediterranean Sea.

The Spanish authorities have increasingly added to the wall.

Sophistications make Ceuta and Melilla increasingly more difficult fortresses to reach for anyone from beyond the EU.

By 2005, the fence's height around both Melilla and Ceuta was doubled up to 6 meters, and

it was finally expanded to fully envelop the entire length of their borders.

By 2014, anti climb mesh was installed and parts of the wall were topped off with barbed wire.

While by 2020, parts of the wall's height were further increased up to 9 meters.

And throughout it all, as the wall's complexities evolved, the violence and tragedies experienced along them continued escalating as well.

Tensions between Spain and Morocco over these disputed territories really began escalating in 2002, when a group of armed Moroccan soldiers occupied this small uninhabited island nearby to Ceuta that is similarly under Spanish sovereignty but disputed by Morocco.

The Moroccan soldiers hoisted a Moroccan flag on the island, which was noticed by a passing Spanish coast guard vessel on its routine patrol.

The Spaniards landed on the island and were confronted by the Moroccans, who forced them back onto their boat at gunpoint after what was reportedly a heated argument.

Over the next few days, the Moroccan soldiers on the island built up a fixed base on it, while the Spanish government warned that it would not accept a Moroccan fait accompli Taking control over the island, Spain sent in naval reinforcements to Ceuta, and

a week after the Moroccans occupied the island, Spain launched a large military operation codenamed Rovio Sierra to evict them and retake it.

4 Eurocopter Cougar helicopters departed from the Spanish mainland early in the morning and landed dozens of Spanish special forces on the occupied island, while Spanish F18 and Mirage F1 fighters flew overhead to provide aerial coverage, just in case the Moroccan air force attempted to interfere.

The special forces were under direct orders to do their best to achieve the recapture of the island with zero casualties, but

they were still well armed and permitted to use lethal force if they were fired upon by the Moroccans first.

In the end, though, the Moroccan soldiers on the island offered up almost no resistance and rapidly surrendered.

They were all taken prisoner and returned back to Morocco, and

the Spanish retook control over the island without a shot having to be fired.

The whole incident showed that military clashes between the Moroccans and the Spanish over these disputed territories were still possible even in the 21st century.

Since then, the Moroccans haven't attempted to occupy the island again.

But the Moroccan government has also continued to maintain its claim to it as well.

And meanwhile, as the pace of migration into both Ceuta and Melilla from across Sub Saharan Africa and the Middle east through Morocco continued growing in scale, and

while Spain and Morocco's ownership dispute over them also continued, the borders around them began growing increasingly deadly as Morocco began calculating on a hybrid warfare strategy of allowing migrants to pass through their territory in order to apply pressure on the territories they wanted.

While Spain continued facing pressure from Brussels to restrict the entry of migrants at the frontiers as much as physically possible.

Across just three months in 2005, between August and October, Amnesty International reported that 13 migrants died at the borders of Ceuta and Melilla, at the hands of Moroccan and Spanish border police.

Waiting to build up their numbers into a critical mass, groups of desperate migrants would organize in Morocco just outside of the border wall, and

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