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Peñón de Vélez de la Gomera
A fortified Spanish rock off Morocco's Rif coast, tied to Africa by a sandbar and an 85-meter border
Rising sheer from the Mediterranean off Morocco's rugged Rif coast, the Peñón de Vélez de la Gomera looks like a fortress that grew out of the sea. For centuries it was an island. Then, in the early 1930s, a mass of sand washed into the narrow channel and joined it to the African mainland, creating a land border where none had existed. That border runs for only about 85 meters across the sandbar, making it one of the shortest international land boundaries in the world. Spain holds the rock as one of its plazas de soberanía, small sovereign possessions on the North African coast. Morocco claims it. A small Spanish military garrison is its only population.
The peñón is a steep limestone crag of about 1.9 hectares, roughly 119 kilometers southeast of Ceuta and a short distance from the Moroccan fishing village of Badis, which gave it its Arabic name. Walls, batteries, a chapel, and garrison buildings stack up its slopes, connected by stairs and tunnels cut into the rock. The sandy isthmus, a tombolo, links it to a cove at the foot of the Rif mountains, and the boundary is marked by a simple line across the beach. There is no civilian access, and supplies arrive by sea or helicopter. The Spanish army maintains a rotating garrison, and the rock is administered directly by the Spanish state rather than by any autonomous region.
Spain first seized the rock in 1508 from corsairs who raided its southern coast, lost it in 1522 when the garrison was killed in a surprise attack, and retook it in 1564 under Philip II. It has been Spanish ever since, along with the other plazas de soberanía such as Alhucemas and the Chafarinas Islands, while the larger cities of Ceuta and Melilla have their own autonomy. Morocco regards all of these possessions as Moroccan territory and has raised the question since independence in 1956. In 2012 a group of Moroccan activists briefly landed on the rock in protest. The two countries have kept the issue largely out of their otherwise close cooperation, and the garrison remains the only presence on the rock.