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Melilla
A Spanish city on Morocco's Mediterranean coast, where Europe meets Africa at a fence
Melilla has been Spanish since 1497, five years after Columbus first sailed west, which makes it older as a Spanish possession than almost anything Spain once held in the Americas. Today it is an autonomous city of about 87,000 people on the Mediterranean coast of northeastern Morocco, part of Spain and of the European Union. Morocco regards it, like Ceuta, as occupied Moroccan land and calls it Mlilya. The city is known for two things that sit oddly together: one of the richest collections of modernist architecture in Spain outside Barcelona, and a triple border fence that has become an emblem of the line between Europe and the migrants trying to reach it.
Melilla covers only about 12.3 square kilometers on the eastern side of the Cape Three Forks peninsula, wrapped on land by the Moroccan province of Nador, whose town of Beni Ansar sits directly at the main border crossing. The old walled citadel, Melilla la Vieja, stands on a rocky headland above the port, and the modernist town below grew in the early twentieth century. Ferries and flights link it to Málaga and Almería across the Alboran Sea. Spain governs it through an elected Assembly and mayor-president, and its Christian, Muslim, Jewish, and Hindu communities give it a mixed character. Like Ceuta, Melilla is inside the EU and Schengen with special arrangements, but outside the customs union and VAT area.
Castile took the abandoned town in 1497, and wars with Morocco over its perimeter flared until the early twentieth century. Morocco has claimed the city since independence in 1956, while Spain considers its sovereignty beyond question. The border fence, built in the 1990s and raised several times, stretches about 12 kilometers, and in June 2022 a mass attempt to cross it left at least 23 dead by Moroccan count, with rights groups reporting more. Morocco closed the city's commercial customs post in 2018. After the 2022 Spanish-Moroccan reconciliation it reopened, with a first commercial shipment in January 2025, but Melilla business groups say traffic has stayed slight, and Morocco suspended goods transit again in July 2026. Whether it resumes on a regular footing remains uncertain.