Why Does Spain Own Two Cities in Africa?

Look at a map of the western Mediterranean and the puzzle is immediate: two cities on Morocco's northern coast, flying the Spanish flag, using the euro, and sending voters to Spanish elections. Ceuta and Melilla are not colonies in the usual sense, and they are not foreign bases leased from Morocco. They are autonomous cities of Spain whose residents live, work, vote, and go to court under Spanish law — even though the land around them is Moroccan. That single distinction explains almost everything else about them: why Spain refused to hand them over in 1956, why Morocco still claims them, and why the argument has lasted for seventy years without either side changing its mind.

Why are they not colonies in the usual sense?

A colony, in the modern sense, is usually a territory ruled from afar, often temporarily, with its people kept outside the full political life of the ruling country. Ceuta and Melilla do not fit that pattern. Their 1995 statutes of autonomy replaced their old city councils with assemblies similar to those of Spain's other autonomous communities, and the first article of each statute describes the city as an integral part of the Spanish nation. Their inhabitants elect those assemblies, take part in Spanish and European elections, and are subject to the same judicial and constitutional institutions as people elsewhere in Spain. The European Union treats them the same way at the level of sovereignty, even while giving them special customs and border arrangements. In a 2023 answer to the European Parliament, the European Commission stated that Ceuta and Melilla are territory of the European Union and part of its external border, and that European Union law therefore applies to them. In 2026 the European Parliament went further, calling them two Spanish and European cities "whose sovereignty and territorial integrity are beyond question". That does not make the cities ordinary Spanish towns. They sit outside mainland Spain, they have their own fiscal and customs peculiarities, and their land borders with Morocco are also the European Union's only land borders with Africa. But the legal category matters: Spain is not administering a distant possession awaiting a referendum. It is governing cities it counts as part of itself, much as it governs a city across the Strait of Gibraltar.

How did two Iberian ports end up on Africa's coast?

The answer starts long before modern Morocco, and long before the European scramble for Africa. Ceuta sits at the Mediterranean entrance to the Strait of Gibraltar, a narrow crossing that has connected — rather than separated — Europe and Africa for centuries. Portugal seized Ceuta in 1415. When the crowns of Spain and Portugal came under the same monarch in 1580, Ceuta passed into that shared monarchy, and when Portugal regained its independence in 1640, the city stayed linked to the Spanish crown. The Treaty of Lisbon confirmed that outcome.

Melilla's story is different, and older in Spanish terms. Spain took control of Melilla in 1497, in an expedition led by Pedro de Estopiñán for the Duke of Medina Sidonia. From then on it remained under Spanish administration, first as a fortified outpost and later as a fully integrated part of Spain's territorial organisation. Both cities spent the following centuries as garrison and trading ports, fortified against attack from land and sea, and both grew into civilian cities around those original strongholds. This chronology is Spain's central historical argument. Ceuta and Melilla were Iberian-held centuries before the protectorate era, and centuries before the independent Morocco that emerged in the twentieth century. Their later boundaries were settled in part by treaties with Moroccan rulers: the Treaty of Peace and Friendship signed at Tetuán in 1860, for example, expressly referred to the "Spanish plazas of Ceuta and Melilla" and set limits and neutral zones around them. Spain reads that language as evidence that Moroccan sovereigns themselves dealt with the cities as Spanish places. Morocco reads the same long history differently, as we will see below.

How did they survive Morocco's independence in 1956?

The decisive test came with decolonisation. In 1912, France and Spain divided Morocco into protectorates under the Treaty of Fez. When Morocco became independent in 1956, France and Spain gave up those protectorates. Spain, however, did not include Ceuta and Melilla in the handover. Its position was that the two cities had never been part of the protectorate at all: they were pre-existing national territory, held since the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, and therefore not land to be returned when a temporary protectorate ended. That argument has held internationally in one important respect. The United Nations does not include Ceuta and Melilla on its list of non-self-governing territories — territories defined as places whose people have not yet attained a full measure of self-government. By contrast, Gibraltar, the British territory on Spain's own southern coast, is on that list. For Madrid, the contrast proves the point: a place with its own assembly, full electoral participation, and Spanish constitutional institutions is not awaiting decolonisation. Domestic law then locked the arrangement in place. Spain's 1978 Constitution, written after the return to democracy, expressly provided a path for Ceuta and Melilla to gain autonomy, and the statutes promulgated in 1995 gave them that status. A legal guide published by New York University's law school summarises the outcome plainly: Spain has seventeen autonomous communities and fifty provinces, plus two autonomous cities — Ceuta and Melilla in northern Africa. They were not left as an anomaly outside the constitutional order. They were written into it.

The cities are small — Ceuta covers about 20 square kilometres and Melilla about 12 — and each is home to more than 80,000 people. Their size makes the dispute easy to dismiss as a cartographic curiosity, like the town where borders cut through houses. Their frontiers were also not drawn as clean lines by distant mapmakers, unlike the straight-line borders found elsewhere in the world. But their location makes them anything but trivial: Ceuta watches the narrow waterway where two seas meet, and both cities sit on migration, trade, and security routes between two continents.

Why does Morocco still claim them, if the legal case looks settled?

Because Morocco's case is not really about the paperwork of 1497 or 1640. It is about geography, history, and national completeness. From Rabat's perspective, two cities on Morocco's own northern shoreline, surrounded on land by Moroccan territory, cannot simply be Spanish because Iberian rulers took them centuries ago. Morocco has maintained its claim since independence in 1956, and it has recorded it formally: when Morocco ratified the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea in 2007, its declaration classified Ceuta and Melilla as Moroccan territories under Spanish occupation and said it had never renounced recovering them. Spain answered the depositary in 2008 that the cities are an integral part of Spain and that it exercises full sovereignty over them. That exchange captures the stalemate. Morocco can point to location and to the long history of North African rule over the region before the Iberian conquests. Spain can point to continuous administration, to treaties that named the cities as Spanish, and to a constitutional order that gives their residents the same political rights as other Spaniards. Neither argument cancels the other, because they are answering different questions: one asks where the cities are, the other asks what they have been for five hundred years. It is also worth clearing up a common misconception. The dispute is not about who runs the cities day to day. Spain does, openly and continuously, through its own police, courts, schools, and elected assemblies. The dispute is about sovereignty — about whether that administration is legitimate in the first place — and about whether a claim based on geography and territorial integrity can outweigh centuries of effective rule and constitutional integration. No court or international body has settled that question to both sides' satisfaction, which is why the cities keep reappearing in diplomatic crises whenever migration, trade, or a royal visit puts them back in the headlines. The honest way to describe Ceuta and Melilla, then, is not as leftovers of empire waiting to be tidied away, nor as ordinary Spanish towns that happen to be south of the Mediterranean. They are historic port cities that became part of Spain before modern Morocco existed, were deliberately excluded from the protectorate that Morocco inherited in 1956, and were then folded into Spain's democratic constitution as autonomous cities. Morocco disputes that story, and will likely keep disputing it. But until either side accepts the other's premise — geography or history — the map will keep showing what it shows today: Spain, in Africa, in two small cities that refuse to fit a simple category.