Rif War & Africanist Militarism

European overseas colonies and crown territories — the Atlantic plantation/slavery complex, Creole societies, and Mediterranean naval colonies (French DOM-TOM, Dutch Caribbean, Gibraltar, Spanish Morocco, Couronian/Swedish ventures).

1 chapter

1860 - 1912

The 1860 war with Morocco and the 1863 free-port declaration transformed Melilla from a starvation-prone garrison into a booming entrepôt. Sephardic Jews from northern Morocco arrived in 1864—the first Jewish community on Spanish soil since the 1492 expulsion. Sindhi Hindu traders came via Gibraltar and the Suez route. Berber workers from the Rif hinterland supplied labor for the expanding port. By the early 20th century, Enrique Nieto's modernist architecture was reshaping the urban core into Spain's second-largest modernist ensemble after Barcelona. A city of four faiths was taking shape, each community building its own house of worship.

1939 - 1975

The Franco regime built on Melilla's Africanist military identity. Franco was remembered locally less as Spain's dictator than as the Rif War hero. A statue erected in his likeness stood in the city center until its removal on February 23, 2021—Spain's last public Franco statue. The Or Zaruah Synagogue (1924) and Central Mosque (inaugurated 1947) operated under regime surveillance. Barbed wire was first installed along the border in 1971 during a cholera outbreak, beginning the physical separation that would define the frontier. Modernist architecture continued to reshape the city under Enrique Nieto and his successors.

1497 - 1860

On September 17, 1497, Pedro de Estopiñán, acting for the Duke of Medina Sidonia, occupied the abandoned city virtually without fighting—not a military conquest of a living Muslim city, but the seizure of a depopulated fortress between warring Moroccan kingdoms. Melilla became a Spanish military presidio on the Barbary Coast, sustained by garrison troops and resupply from the peninsula. The Capilla de Santiago (1551) is probably the only Gothic building in continental Africa. The Purísima Concepción church (1657) doubled as the city cemetery. Fort Victoria Grande (1735–36) embodies the 18th-century fortress expansion. The Virgin of Victory became the city's patron saint, her September 8 feast marking the garrison's deliverance.

1975 - 1995

Spain's democratic transition reached Melilla unevenly. The 1986 Ley de Extranjería flexibilized citizenship for the Berber community, reducing the legal precarity of Muslim residents. The border fence construction began in 1998, replacing the 1971 barbed wire with a permanent physical barrier that reshaped the city's relationship with its Moroccan hinterland. The Church of the Sacred Heart (1900–1918) and existing cofradías maintained Holy Week traditions that now incorporated newly democratic civic institutions. The foundations were being laid for the autonomous city status that would transform Melilla's governance.