The southern border has always been crucial for peninsular interests. Already in the year 711, seven thousand Muslim warriors disembarked in the bay of Algeciras. For this reason, when Granada, the last Saracen redoubt on the peninsula, fell in 1492, Isabella of Castilla set out to continue the Reconquest beyond the Strait. In fact, she asked for it in her will: "That they do not stop the conquest of Africa."
In 1505 Mazalquivir fell, an important port because it was the gate to Oran, the hideout of the corsairs who harassed the coasts of the eastern peninsula and Italy; the following year, with the defeat of the Guanches from Tenerife, the conquest of the Canary Islands culminated; to the other, Don Juan de Guzmán occupied Melilla; In 1508, Captain Pedro Navarro seized the rock of Vélez de la Gomera (halfway between Melilla and Ceuta, which was then Portuguese); in 1509, finally, Oran fell; in 1510, Bugía, Algiers and Tripoli, and already Carlos V entered Tunis in triumph in 1535.
Despite this spectacular advance, there they stayed; there was no conquest of Africa. On the part of Ferdinand the Catholic, because he had a more urgent war to fight in Naples (the foreign policy of the Crown of Aragon always prioritized Italy). As for his successors, because the New World appeared to them as a more desirable loot, and because the continuous fighting in the European Empire absorbed the greater part of the budget.
A precedent was set, since from then on Spain's only interest in Africa would be to maintain some strongholds on the north coast. The objective was threefold: control Berber piracy, prevent the expansion of the Ottoman Empire and protect the southern flank of the peninsula from possible attacks.
Due to the alliance between pirates and Ottomans, not even this minimal goal turned out to be an easy task. When Felipe II came to the throne in the mid-16th century, only Melilla, the rock of Vélez de la Gomera and Orán remained of the Spanish squares, to which he added Ceuta, Tangier and Mazagán when he took possession of the Portuguese Crown.
What this king did was undertake an ambitious project to fortify these positions, and that began with good administration. The responsible body was the Council of War (the Council of the Indies was in charge of the defense of America). A soldier was assigned to each zone, who informed Madrid of the state of the fortresses and the progress of the works. They were men like Bautista Antonelli and Vespasiano Gonzaga, military engineers educated in Italy, the country that in the 16th century led the way in fortification technology.
The Italian plan had been invented there, a wall that arose in the Renaissance as a response to new weapons (above all, artillery). The walls became wider than they were tall, they were given a certain slope, and that characteristic star shape topped by bastions.
The historian Alicia Cámara Muñoz followed up on how the defensive ring of the peninsula was closed, discovering that it was executed, more or less, in the opposite sense to the needles of the clock. First the Pyrenees were covered, followed by the Andalusian coast and North Africa, then Catalonia and the Balearic Islands, and finally Levante. In other words, after the Pyrenees, the Strait was the second most important area.
No one wanted to go to the prisons (fortresses) of Melilla, Orán, Ceuta or Mazalquivir, so the prisoners had to be sent. These were isolated places, which, due to the hostility of the native population, did not have a hinterland (zone of influence around a city). His life depended on communication with the peninsula, always fragile; even for the payments, which were slow to arrive.
The problem was that there was always something more urgent, some "hot" spot in the Empire that was absorbing the ever scarce funds. They ended up paying for it, especially when the Alawite dynasty rose in Morocco, the first capable of emulating the power of the ancient caliphates. Ismail of Morocco took Larache and La Mamora, which had briefly been in Spanish hands, and, between 1694 and 1727, subjected Ceuta to a brutal siege.
It was not until the end of the War of Succession (1701-1714) that the most urgent task could be undertaken, the reconquest of Oran, which the Ottomans had taken taking advantage of the chaos of the conflict between the Habsburgs and the Bourbons. This done, the brand new Felipe V ordered a second reconstruction of the African wall. The difference with the 17th century reform is that this time it was done from an enlightened perspective.
As the historian Fernando R. de la Flor explains, the engineers no longer understood defense from a purely military point of view. The fortresses were important, but so were the people who lived inside, and even those outside, the surrounding indigenous population. De la Flor comments on the case of José Vallejo de la Canal, the governor of Orán, whom he considers an archetypal enlightened military man.
In addition to rebuilding the walls in a Vaubanian sense –by the Marquis de Vauban, a great figure in military engineering–, he was concerned with improving the living conditions of the troops and including the natives, or rather those who they will be left, in the daily life of the square. He created the Mogataces Company, the first unit made up exclusively of Muslim soldiers, long before the Melilla Regulares or French indigenous companies.
So far the optimistic, because it was also Vallejo who wrote the Report on the status and value of the squares of Orán and Mazalquivir, a discouraging document on the future of the prisons. And it is that Vallejo was enlightened for everything. Without being imbued with patriotic whims, he recognized that keeping Oran would cost many lives.
However, in Madrid a more pragmatic state of opinion was being generated. Another famous report was that of General Jaime de Guzmán-Dávalos, written in the time of Carlos III. After consulting with prominent engineers and with the directors of the mathematics academies of Oran and Barcelona (where the officers of the Royal Corps of Engineers were trained), he came to the conclusion that Melilla had to be abandoned, but not before destroying it.
Of course, at the same time he recommended taking advantage of the resources released to create a stable fleet between Orán, the rock of Vélez de la Gomera and the Al Hoceima islands. In other words, it was not a question of unguarding the southern flank, but of being reasonable and proposing a viable defense.
And that was a moderate position, since there were those who defended the total abandonment of the Maghreb, with the exception of Ceuta. For these, the presence in Africa was meaningless if a series of positions were not occupied along the entire coast, something that had not happened since the times of Fernando el Católico. As Fernando R. de la Flor points out, not even Guzmán-Dávalos himself was unaware of this.
Even so, it still seemed prudent not to withdraw altogether. Not only for strategy, but because it had its propaganda effectiveness, since it made the inhabitants of the south of the peninsula feel protected –perhaps illusorily–. We must not forget that, due to its proximity to the Islamic world, people lived there with a certain psychosis.
Be that as it may, and despite the catastrophic omens, in 1774 the governor of Melilla, Juan Sherlock (one of the many Irish Catholics who emigrated to Spain), managed to resist the siege of a Moroccan-British coalition.
This silenced those who wanted abandonment, for a time at least. The debate would return, then, despite the efforts, the truth is that the eighteenth century was ending, and the situation in the prisons had not changed excessively. Living conditions did not improve, attacks from the sultanate increased, and being there continued to cost a potosí.
Carlos IV inaugurated his reign in the last decade of the century, handing over Orán and Mazalquivir to Algeria. And if he hadn't been for the rise of Manuel Godoy, an "Africanist", to the position of valid, perhaps he would have done the same with Melilla.
It was an ambiguous situation, which was not broken until 1830. That year, France began its conquest of Algeria, an event that changed the status quo that had prevailed for centuries. From one day to the next, Spain, which since the time of the Catholic Monarchs had had no interest in occupying the Maghreb, found itself almost forced to do so. If not, France would do it, closing a fence on the peninsula through the Pyrenees and to the south. Once again, the Strait was again the place where Spain risked everything.
Spurred on by Great Britain, which did not like that scenario either, in 1847 Queen Elizabeth II ordered the occupation of the Chafarinas Islands before the Gauls did. It was only the beginning, since in 1859 the government of Leopoldo O'Donnell invaded the Rif, in a campaign that achieved little more than the expansion of the glacis of Ceuta and Melilla.
The continuous interference of the colonial powers forced the sultan Abd al-Hafid to surrender, who in 1912 ceded the sovereignty of his country to France. To appease Spain, the establishment of two protectorates was agreed, one Spanish and one French.
Despite the dreams of the Africanists, the truth is that it was a long way from recovering the old Mauritania Tingitana (the Roman province in the Maghreb of which Isabella the Catholic felt like the heiress). The territory he touched in the distribution was mountainous and impervious, inhabited by a hostile people – the Rif people – that not even the sultan controlled.
At the beginning of the 20th century, a terrible war broke out, which took the lives of thousands of soldiers and provoked a protest in Barcelona, the Tragic Week, which was about to end the presence in Africa and the Restoration system itself. .
Even after General Miguel Primo de Rivera carried out his coup d'état in 1923 – in order to save the situation – there were many who continued to ask to get out of there. As is known, far from doing that, he landed in Al Hoceima (1925) and put an end to the rebellion.
That "as long as Morocco is not abandoned, our country will not be able to raise its head, neither morally nor materially", which the socialist Pablo Iglesias said in his day, kicked for a long time. With the Protectorate economically stagnant, during the Second Republic the issue of abandonment –also of Ceuta and Melilla– reappeared.
And once again, an unexpected event intervened in the fate of these squares. It was the coup d'état of 1936, in which the Army of Africa played a leading role. Somehow, the Protectorate was the material, and also moral, rearguard of the rebels. After the Civil War (1936-1939), far from thinking about leaving, the Franco regime adopted a benevolent position towards the indigenous, but neocolonialist.
However, when in 1956 France recognized the independence of Morocco, Spain had no choice but to do the same and abandon the Protectorate. Not Ceuta and Melilla, nor the current minor places (Alhucemas, Chafarinas and the Rock of Vélez de la Gomera islands), whose transfer was never on the table.
At this point, the old abandonist debate no longer had a reason to exist. Since the beginning of the 20th century, and thanks to their status as Protectorate ports, Ceuta and Melilla had undergone a sensational transformation. Their demography increased, they woke up economically and commercially, and urban reorganizations made them habitable. They were no longer prisons, but cities comparable to any other on the Peninsula.
They are the only thing that remains, together with the Canaries, of the imposing defensive ring that the Catholic Monarchs built.
