This Week's Lead Melilla: The City That Outlasted Every Ruler 🇪🇸 On 17 September 1497, a Spanish captain named Pedro de Estopiñán occupied a ruined North African port without a fight. There was barely anything left to fight for — the town the Phoenicians had founded as Rusadir some 2,100 years earlier, and that had passed through Carthaginian, Roman, Umayyad, Almohad, and Marinid hands, sat mostly abandoned by the time Spain arrived. What Estopiñán actually took was a location: the only sheltered anchorage on an otherwise mountainous, harbourless run of North African coast between Tetuán and the Algerian frontier. Nothing comparable existed nearby. That scarcity, not scale, is what has kept Melilla worth holding for the 529 years since. The holding was never quiet. In 1774–75, Sultan Mohammed III laid siege with 30,000–40,000 men and 12,000 projectiles; a relief fleet arrived just in time. In 1893, Rif tribes besieged the city and killed the Spanish governor in what Moroccan sources call the War of Sidi Wariach. In 1921, Abd el-Krim's Riffian forces annihilated the Spanish army at Annual and pushed the front back to Melilla's gates — a catastrophe that eventually helped topple the Spanish monarchy. In 1936, the military coup that started the Spanish Civil War launched from Melilla itself. At least six sieges, one national disaster, one revolution — and the port kept operating through all of them, because whoever held it still held the only safe place on the coast to land a ship. What actually changed, repeatedly, was what Melilla was allowed to sell. Free-port status in 1863 brought Sephardic trading houses from Tetuán. Rif iron ore built a mining boom and a railway in 1908. A Gaudí disciple, Enrique Nieto, arrived in 1909 and built North Africa's largest Art Nouveau district on the back of that wealth. Each era found a different product to move through the same fixed geography — ivory, grain, gold, iron ore, duty-free goods, and eventually the border crossing itself. The most recent product to move through Melilla is people, not cargo. In 2022, at least 23 migrants died — Moroccan, UN, and Moroccan human-rights body counts diverge as high as 37+ — attempting the Barrio Chino crossing from Nador. Land-based cross-border trade has collapsed more than 40% since Morocco shut the commercial customs post in 2018, and Melilla's free-port business model is mid-reinvention right now, five centuries after Estopiñán first proved the location alone was worth fighting for. 2,600 years, 7 ruling powers, at least 6 sieges — and the trade routed through Melilla has still changed more often than the ruler holding it |
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