Why Ceuta and Melilla are Spanish. Spain does not win the historical argument by having arrived first, but because the origin of a territory does not decide what that territory is today.

Between Thursday 30 and Friday 31 July 2026, somewhere between 50,000 and 60,000 people entered Ceuta in under 24 hours. That is the equivalent of 70% of the city’s population. The death toll varies depending on who is giving it and as of today there is no closed official count. The Government Delegation was speaking of 72 on Sunday, the Government of the Autonomous City raised the figure to 88 on Monday, and the Unified Association of Civil Guards puts it at around a hundred. In most cases the cause was drowning.

The trigger does not appear to have been what many took for granted in the first hours. On 8 July 2026 the Supreme Court ruled that summary pushbacks [devoluciones en caliente] do not apply to those arriving by sea, who must go through a formal procedure. On social media that legal nuance turned into something else, into Spain having opened the border and into anyone swimming across no longer being returnable. The hoax ran through WhatsApp, TikTok, Instagram and Telegram, maps of the swimming route from Castillejos circulated and wetsuits for the crossing were even put up for sale on Facebook. The Spanish Government and the Moroccan authorities agree in attributing the spread to human trafficking networks, although neither has publicly identified those networks nor presented evidence. Rabat denies any responsibility. The Government mobilised the Armed Forces in support of the Guardia Civil and most of those who crossed returned voluntarily to Morocco within 48 hours. All of that is public domain information, since we cannot base ourselves on information that is unverified or that we have no access to.

Even so, and even though this time there are no signs of a state operation, the same old debate came back within hours. A Moroccan newspaper regarded as semi-official to the Palace published in four languages that perhaps the time had come to talk about «more important things», meaning the future of the two cities. And the permanent representative of Israel to the United Nations joined in on social media asking why Spain still holds «colonial enclaves». Still without all the information on the causes of what happened, and the matter was already on the table.

And it comes back badly framed, as always. People argue about who was there first, as though History were a land registry. It is not, and it is not for anyone. That is precisely the argument Spain wins, as we shall now see. If the business of historical ownership were applied to everybody, the countries that exist today would not even exist.

 

 

What was there before the year 700.

It is often said that the Idrisid dynasty, which arrives in the year 788, is the origin of the Moroccan state. Let us accept that as a working hypothesis. The problem is that if origin conferred title, that date arrives very late indeed, and whoever invokes it has to explain why it has to be that date and not earlier ones.

Because there was a great deal before, and all of it left cities standing. The Phoenicians founded Lixus, Tingis, Sala and Rusaddir ─which is Melilla─ from the 8th century BC onwards, and Carthage later inherited that network of ports. Then came the kingdom of Mauretania, Amazigh, with its own coinage, with embassies and with treaties, ruled by Bocchus, by Juba II and by Ptolemy, and with its capital at Volubilis. Rome annexed it in the year 40, after Caligula had its last king murdered, and turned it into the province of Mauretania Tingitana, with its capital at Tangier. In the 5th century the Vandals arrived. In 534 Justinian recovered Septem ─Ceuta─ for the Byzantine Empire, which held it until the Muslim conquest of the year 709.

When Idris I reached the Maghreb in 788, fleeing the Abbasids after the defeat at Fakhkh, Lixus had been standing for around 1,500 years. And he was taken in by the Awraba, who were Amazigh and had been there a great deal longer than he had.

Now then, if the criterion of «we were here first» really counted, Lebanon would have something to say about Melilla and about Tangier by way of Phoenicia, Tunisia would have a claim by way of Carthage, Italy by way of Rome over Volubilis and over half of Mauretania Tingitana, and Greece or Turkey by way of Byzantium over Ceuta, which was theirs for nearly two centuries. All of them were there before the year 700, and by a wide margin.

And here comes the important part, the one almost nobody says. None of that is true. Lebanon is not Phoenicia, Tunisia is not Carthage, Italy is not Rome ─Italy as a state is born in 1861─ and Turkey is not Byzantium. There is no legal succession of any kind between those peoples and these states, only a cultural kinship that generates no rights over anything. And if we really wanted to look for the first inhabitants, no modern state would come out of it either, but the Amazigh populations, who have been there longer than everybody else and are claiming nothing from anybody.

That is the point. The argument from antiquity, taken all the way, gives nobody the win. It falls apart on its own. And since it falls apart in one direction, it falls apart in the other too, which is why it has to be dropped in both.

 

Origin does not decide the present.

A territory is not a thing with an eternal owner. It is a sediment. What it was on a given date does not determine what it is today, because between that date and this one there are centuries that also count and that also produce reality. This is not a Spanish convenience. It is how international law has worked for a century, and without it not a single border on the planet is left standing.

The Island of Palmas arbitration, decided by Max Huber in 1928, settled the rule that any court applies today. A legal fact is judged by the law of its own time and not by the law in force when someone decides to dispute it. The taking of Ceuta in 1415 and of Melilla in 1497 are judged by the law of 1415 and of 1497, not by the anticolonial doctrine of 1960. Huber added a second half that almost nobody quotes and that is the one demanding actual work, because the initial title is not enough and sovereignty has to keep being exercised in step with the way the law evolves. Spain has done that, and we shall now see how.

First, the test any principle has to pass, which is to apply it to everybody equally and see what comes out. If origin conferred title, the borders of Morocco with Algeria would collapse, because France drew them ─Lalla Maghnia in 1845, the Varnier line, and the 1972 treaty that Morocco did not ratify until 1992─. The whole Maghreb and the Sahel would reopen, because the same European pencil drew all those limits. Rabat could claim Granada by way of the Almohads, and Greece could claim Anatolia, which was Greek a thousand years before it was Turkish. Mexico would recover Texas and California. The whole of America would be illegitimate. And, above all, it would be the same argument Russia used with Crimea and with Ukraine, the one that 141 states rejected at the General Assembly on 2 March 2022.

A principle that, applied consistently, dissolves the map of the world and vindicates the most condemned annexation of this century is not a principle. It is a rhetorical tool for selective use.

Africa understood this perfectly and very early. The Cairo resolution of 1964 committed African states to respect the borders they held at independence, precisely because the entire continent is a product of colonial drawing and the historical criterion would have lit one war after another. The International Court of Justice raised that criterion to a general principle in the frontier dispute between Burkina Faso and Mali, in 1986. And there is a fact that almost never comes up in the debate, which is that Morocco was one of the very few states that did not sign up to that consensus, along with Somalia, consistent with the Greater Morocco doctrine. As a political aspiration it is legitimate. But it leaves Rabat arguing from outside the framework the rest of the continent accepted in order to protect itself.

This binds Spain too, and it is worth saying loudly. If we hold that antiquity confers no title, we can never again say «we got here first». It would be the same fallacy under a different flag, and whoever uses it is left without the rest of this article. The consistent position is a different one, which is that Spain does not defend Ceuta and Melilla for what they were, but for what they are and for how they came to be that way.

 

What does decide the present.

And this is where Spain wins, on four counts.

The first is the treaties, which is the strongest argument and the worst used. The Moroccan claim rests on today’s Morocco continuing yesterday’s Sharifian Empire. Well then, that Sharifian Empire recognised Spanish sovereignty by treaty. In the Treaty of Marrakesh of 1767 with Charles III, in the Convention of Meknes of 1799 setting the limits and guarantees of the two garrison towns, in the convention of 1859 delimiting the boundary of Melilla ─the famous cannon shot from Victoria Grande, some twelve square kilometres─, in the Treaty of Wad-Ras of April 1860 enlarging the territory of Ceuta in full sovereignty after the African War, and in the Convention of Marrakesh of 1894. From this comes a dilemma with no clean way out. Either today’s Morocco succeeds the Sharifian empire and inherits those treaties, or it does not succeed it and has no historical title at all. You cannot take the inheritance and repudiate the debts.

The second is the Protectorate, and it is the one that settles the matter. The Treaty of Fez of March 1912 established the French protectorate and the Franco-Spanish convention of November delimited the Spanish zone. Ceuta and Melilla were expressly left out, because they were Spanish national territory and not protected territory. That is why the capital of the Protectorate was Tetouan and not Ceuta, even though Ceuta was larger and better connected. A protectorate does not transfer sovereignty, it suspends it. When it ended in 1956, the Sultan recovered what he held in 1912. And in 1912 he did not hold these two cities.

The third is consistency, which is hard to rebut because these are facts. Spain returned Tarfaya in 1958, returned Ifni in 1969 and left the Sahara in 1975. Three territories returned and two retained. If this were pure opportunism nothing would have been returned. What was protectorate or colony was returned and what was national territory was kept.

The fourth is that Ceuta and Melilla have never appeared on the list of Non-Self-Governing Territories of the United Nations, despite Morocco having been trying since the 1960s. There are 17 territories and neither of the two is there. Gibraltar is on it, and has been since 1946, when the United Kingdom registered it as such under Article 73 e of the Charter. That asymmetry is not decided by Spain, it is decided by the UN, and that is why the comparison with Gibraltar does not work. One should also bear in mind that, as the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs itself recalls, in the Gibraltar case the United Nations has held that the applicable principle is not self-determination but territorial integrity. Spain is not using two yardsticks, it is using the one it has been handed.

To all of this must be added what international courts consider decisive when there is no better title, which is effective, peaceful and continuous possession [effectivités]. Spain has spent 529 years in Melilla and 611 in Ceuta exercising civil, fiscal, criminal and military jurisdiction without interruption. Six centuries are not a parenthesis to be corrected. They are the process that produced these cities as they exist today, with their population, their language, their law, their economy and their Catholic, Muslim, Jewish and Hindu mix.

 

The people who live there do not want to be Moroccan.

This argument usually gets left at the level of a platitude and it deserves numbers.

Ceuta has around 83,600 inhabitants and Melilla around 86,000. The Constitution of 1978 already named them both in its fifth transitional provision, which opened the door to their establishing a regime of self-government. They did so with organic laws 1/1995 and 2/1995, of 13 March, with their own Assembly elected by universal suffrage, a president, a governing council, devolved powers and representation in the Congress and the Senate.

And here comes the figure that is almost never mentioned and that carries the most weight. Close to half the electoral roll of Melilla is Muslim, and in Ceuta the proportion is similar, largely of Rifian or Jebala origin. All of them are Spanish citizens with full rights, with universal suffrage and without any differentiated legal status.

In more than 40 years of democracy, no force proposing integration into Morocco has obtained representation in either of the two cities. Not one. The parties with a mainly Muslim electorate that do obtain seats are Spanish autonomist or left-wing formations, and one of their leaders went on to preside over Melilla. A Muslim from Melilla presiding over a Spanish autonomous city is exactly the opposite of what one would expect in a colony.

This turns the anticolonial argument on its head. Handing 170,000 people to a state they do not want to be part of would be, in the logic of self-determination, precisely the colonial act it claims to fight. Algeria is cited a great deal as a precedent, but the comparison does not hold. In Algeria there were 9 million Muslim Algerians subject to the Code de l’indigénat, without full citizenship, under a settler minority with privileged rights. In Ceuta and Melilla there is no differentiated status of any kind and half the city is Muslim and votes in Spanish elections.

Yes, it is also true that in Ceuta and Melilla no referendum has ever been held on this question. The evidence for the will of their inhabitants is electoral and indirect, however consistent it has been over decades. Anyone who wants to contest it has room to do so, and it is legitimate that they should.

 

And Morocco does not want them either.

This is the part least said and possibly the most interesting.

Ceuta and Melilla are the only land border between Africa and the European Union. That is their real geopolitical function and it is why Morocco keeps them where it keeps them. As long as they exist as Spanish, Rabat is the gatekeeper. It can open and it can close. It did so in May 2021, when around 9,000 people came in on foot or swimming after the Moroccan police temporarily relaxed controls, while it was in dispute with Spain over the hospitalisation of the leader of the Polisario Front. That episode is documented and condemned. The European Parliament formally censured it on 10 June 2021, by 397 votes in favour, 85 against and 196 abstentions, rejecting the use of border control and of unaccompanied minors as political pressure against a member state. CIDOB called it by its name, the weaponisation of migration.

This week, by contrast, does not fit that mould, and it is important not to force it to fit. There is no open diplomatic crisis between Madrid and Rabat, the documented trigger is a viral hoax about a Spanish court ruling, and Morocco has denied responsibility and pointed at the mafias just as the Spanish Government has. Evidence of something else may appear later on, but today there is none. And that difference, far from weakening the argument, reinforces it, because it shows that this border can blow up without Rabat wanting it to. A gatekeeper who loses control of his gate has a problem, not a lever.

Because that gatekeeper gets paid for being one. He gets paid in European funds for border management, running to hundreds of millions of euros over the last decade. He gets paid in fisheries agreements, in agricultural quotas and in preferential trade treatment. If Morocco absorbed the two cities, the European external border would move to the Strait and Morocco would stop being the gatekeeper and become simply the country across the water. It would spend the key for good in exchange for two cities. In terms of power, that is a bad deal.

There is also a very concrete economic matter. The neighbouring Moroccan provinces have lived off those two cities for decades. The so-called atypical trade ─the porteo─ supported tens of thousands of families in Nador and in the Tetouan and Castillejos area, and when Morocco shut it down between 2019 and 2020 it had to launch emergency development plans to cover the hole. Add to that the thousands of Moroccan workers who crossed every day to work in domestic service, construction and retail. The figures for all this vary a great deal depending on the source and none of them is official, so they have to be taken with a pinch of salt, but nobody disputes the order of magnitude. And it says something that, after the 2022 rapprochement, what Morocco opened were commercial customs posts with the two cities. Customs posts are opened with a neighbour, not with a territory one intends to absorb.

And then the most practical point of all. Those 170,000 people hold Spanish and therefore European passports. In a hypothetical transfer they would not stay. They would leave for the Peninsula, as nearly a million pieds-noirs left Algeria in 1962. Morocco would inherit two empty cities, with European-level infrastructure and public services to be sustained on a Moroccan budget, plus the bill for rebuilding an economic fabric that had just sailed away. It is not a prize. It is a burden.

But careful, all of this is an argument from interest, not from right. States do things against their own interest all the time, especially when what is at stake is symbolic. And there is a reasonable hypothesis, though an unproven one, that Morocco finds the open claim more useful than the settled claim, because a pending grievance builds cohesion at home and gives leverage abroad, whereas a satisfied one is over. If that were so, Rabat would not want the cities. It would want to claim them forever. But it is a hypothesis and we present it as such.

One thing remains to be said, and it is about migration. It is often repeated that handing over Ceuta and Melilla would solve the problem, and it would not. Flows respond to differences in income, employment and expectations, not to where a line is drawn, so moving the line south would move the fence and not the difference. They are not even the main route of irregular entry into Spain, because most arrivals come by sea or stay on after entering legally with a visa. But the important thing is that sovereignty does not depend on that. If migratory pressure vanished tomorrow, Ceuta and Melilla would still be Spanish for exactly the same reasons. These are two separate conversations and they have to be kept separate, because mixing them hands the other side the easiest reply there is, which is «so you are not defending a right, you are defending a fence».

And let it be clear how this is defended, because it is going to be needed in the coming months. It is not defended by saying we got here first. It is defended by saying there is a title valid in its own time, consolidated by treaties that Morocco itself signed, held without interruption for more than half a millennium, expressly excluded from the colonial regime in 1912, never listed as a colony by the United Nations, recognised in the Constitution and endorsed every four years by the vote of 170,000 Spanish citizens, half of them Muslim, who have never once voted for anybody proposing otherwise.

And the last thing, which is not the least important. Between 70 and 100 people, if not more, drowned at the Tarajal for having believed a false message on a mobile phone. A good number of them were kids of 16 and 17 who said afterwards that they had found out through social media and that they had spent 5 hours swimming. Whoever it was that set up the hoax, and let us hope it becomes known, was playing with people who were nobody’s pieces. Too many people have been playing with that border for too long. And giving in to the method, wherever it comes from, would not defuse it. It would validate it.

 

Sources:

• The United Nations and Decolonization, Gibraltar file and list of the seventeen Non-Self-Governing Territories.
• Ministry of Foreign Affairs, European Union and Cooperation, official position on Gibraltar.
• European Parliament resolution of 10 June 2021 on the breach of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and the use of minors by the Moroccan authorities in the migratory crisis in Ceuta.
• Statutes of Autonomy, Organic Law 1/1995 for Ceuta and Organic Law 2/1995 for Melilla, both of 13 March.
• UNESCO, archaeological site of Volubilis, capital of the kingdom of Mauretania and later a Roman city.
• Island of Palmas arbitration (Netherlands v. United States), arbitrator Max Huber, 4 April 1928.
• International Court of Justice, Frontier Dispute (Burkina Faso / Republic of Mali), judgment of 22 December 1986.
• Organisation of African Unity, resolution AHG/Res.16(I), Cairo, July 1964.
• United Nations General Assembly, resolution ES-11/1, of 2 March 2022.
• Treaty of Lisbon, 1668.
• Treaty of Marrakesh, 1767.
• Convention of Meknes, 1799.
• Melilla boundary convention, 1859.
• Treaty of Wad-Ras, 1860.
• Convention of Marrakesh, 1894.
• Treaty of Fez, 1912, and Franco-Spanish convention of November 1912.
• Cintra Agreements, 1958.
• Treaty of Fez returning Ifni, 1969.
• Madrid Accords, 1975.
• For the crisis of 30 and 31 July 2026, coverage by Infobae, Cuatro, EFE and Europa Press between 30 July and 4 August 2026. The figures for entries and for fatalities are provisional, there is no closed official count and they diverge between the Government Delegation, the Government of the Autonomous City of Ceuta and the professional associations of the Guardia Civil.