Melilla (, ; ) is an autonomous city of Spain on the North African coast. It lies on the eastern side of the Cape Three Forks, on the Morocco–Spain border, adjacent to the Moroccan port town of Beni Ansar, and faces the Mediterranean Sea. It has an area of .
The trading outpost of Rusadir was established on the current site by seafaring Phoenicians. Passed over among several powers during Antiquity and the middle ages, the place was forsaken amid strife between the Kingdoms of Fez and Tlemcen, and it was seized by Christians in 1497, constituting a condominium between the House of Medina Sidonia and the Crown of Castile until 1556. Integrated in the Hispanic Monarchy, the fortress of Melilla la Vieja remained a military praesidium with limited civilian population for much of the early modern period. After the expansion of Melilla's perimetre to its current limits in the wake of the Treaty of Wad Ras (1860), the area in between Melilla la Vieja and the outer forts was urbanised and populated by mainland Spaniards, Sephardi Jews and Riffians, and the local economy thrived from the mining (iron ore) operations in the eastern Rif. Prior to the passing of its Statute of Autonomy in 1995, Melilla was a regular municipality of the province of Málaga.
Melilla is one of the special territories of the member states of the European Union. Movements to and from the rest of the EU and Melilla are subject to specific rules, provided for in the Accession Agreement of Spain to the Schengen Convention. As of 2025, Melilla had a population of 87,067. It has a small airport and its port is connnected to the ports of Málaga, Motril, and Almería via ferry. The population is chiefly divided between people of Iberian and Riffian extraction. There are also small numbers of Sephardic Jews and Sindhi Hindus. Melilla features a diglossia between the official Spanish and Tarifit. Like the autonomous city of Ceuta and Spain's other territories along the northern African coast, Melilla is subject to an irredentist claim by Morocco.
Name
Borrowed from Spanish, the English name is pronounced or to approximate the sound of the Spanish double L, properly in most standard Spanish dialects. The name is attested from the 9th century, deriving from Arabic (, ) possibly of Riffian Berber origin.Yahia, Jahfar Hassan (2014). Curso de lengua tamazight, nivel elemental. Caminando en la didáctica de la lengua rifeña It could come from the Amazigh root M·L·L (meaning 'white'), producing the Amazigh "mlilet" or "Amlal", from which the name was subsequently adopted into Arabic as . It would share then a similar etymology with Beni Mellal in the Atlas Mountains. In local Tarifit, the name developed into "Mřič" () through the sound changes /l/ → [ɾ] and /lt/ → [t͡ʃ]. The name might also be related to honey (; ; , ) since Melilla was a notable site for beekeeping in antiquity, a bee appearing prominently on the city's bronze coinage under Mauretanian rule.
History Antiquity and Middle Ages
Melilla was a Phoenician and later Punic trade establishment under variations of the name Rusadir (, ), taken from the Phoenician name of the nearby Cape Three Forks. After Carthage's defeat in the Punic Wars, the city fell under the control of the Roman client state Mauretania. After its annexation under Caligula, Claudius organized it as part of the province of Mauretania Tingitana. Pliny mentions it as a native hillfort and port ().Pliny, Nat. Hist., Book V, Ch. 18. It was made a Roman colony in , after which it was sometimes referenced as Flavia. Rusadir was said to have once been the seat of a bishop, but there is no record of any bishop of the purported see,Sophrone Pétridès, "Rusaddir" in Catholic Encyclopedia (New York 1912) and it is not included in the Catholic Church's list of modern titular sees.Annuario Pontificio 2013 (Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2013, ), p. 960
The political history is similar to that of towns in the region of the Moroccan Rif and southern Spain. Melilla was progressively ruled by the Vandals, Byzantines, and the Visigoths. In the early 6th century, it was the main port of the Mauro-Roman Kingdom. After the Islamic conquest of North Africa, it fell under the Umayyads, Cordobans, Idrisids, Almoravids, Almohads, Marinids, and Wattasids.
Early Modern period During the 15th century, the city declined, like most Mediterranean cities of the Kingdom of Fez, eclipsed by those on the Atlantic. After the Catholic Monarchs' conquest of the Nasrid Kingdom of Granada in 1492, their Secretary gathered intelligence about the sorry state of the North African coast with territorial expansion in mind. He sent agents to investigate, and subsequently reported to the Catholic Monarchs that, as of 1494, locals had expelled the authority of the Sultan of Fez and had offered to pledge loyalty. While the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas put Melilla and Cazaza, until then reserved to the Portuguese, under the sphere of Castile, the conquest of the city had to wait, delayed by the French occupation of Naples.
The Duke of Medina Sidonia, Juan Alfonso Pérez de Guzmán, advocated seizing Melilla, to be headed by , and the Catholic Monarchs, Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon, endorsed the initiative and provided the assistance of artillery officer Francisco Ramírez de Madrid. Melilla was occupied on 17 September 1497, virtually without violence as it was on the border between the Kingdom of Tlemcen and the Kingdom of Fez, and as a result had been fought over many times and left abandoned.; No large-scale expansion into the Kingdom of Fez ensued, barring the enterprises of the Cardinal Cisneros along the Algerian coast in Mers El Kébir and Oran, and the rock of Badis in the territorial scope of the Kingdom of Fez. The Hispanic monarchy's imperial impetus was eventually directed elsewhere to the Italian Wars against France, and, especially after 1519, to the newly discovered continent across the Atlantic.
Melilla was initially jointly administered by the House of Medina Sidonia and the Crown, and a 1498 settlement required the former to station a 700-man garrison in Melilla and the latter to provide the city with a number of maravedíes and wheat fanegas. The Crown's interest in Melilla decreased during the reign of Charles V. During the 16th century, soldiers stationed in Melilla were badly remunerated, leading to many desertions. The Duke of Medina Sidonia relinquished responsibility over the garrison of the place on 7 June 1556.
During the late 17th century, Alaouite sultan Ismail Ibn Sharif attempted to conquer the presidio, taking the outer fortifications in the 1680s and further unsuccessfully besieging Melilla in the 1690s.
One Spanish officer reflected, "an hour in Melilla, from the point of view of merit, was worth more than thirty years of service to Spain."Rezette, p. 41
Late Modern period The current limits of the Spanish territory around the Melilla fortress were fixed by treaties with Morocco in 1859, 1860, 1861, and 1894. In the late 19th century, as Spanish influence expanded in this area, the Crown authorized Melilla as the only centre of trade on the Rif coast between Tetuan and the Algerian border. The value of trade increased, with goat skins, eggs and beeswax the principal exports, and cotton goods, tea, sugar and candles the chief imports.
Melilla's civil population in 1860 still amounted to only 375 estimated inhabitants. In a 1866 Hispano-Moroccan arrangement signed in Fes, both parties agreed to allow for the installment of a customs office near the border with Melilla, to be operated by Moroccan officials. The Treaty of Peace with Morocco that followed the 1859–60 War entailed the acquisition of a new perimeter for Melilla, bringing its area to that where the 12 km2 the autonomous city currently stands. Following the declaration of Melilla as a free port in 1863, the population began to increase, chiefly with Sephardi Jews fleeing from Tetouan who fostered trade in and out of the city. The first Jews from Tetouan probably arrived in 1864, and the first rabbi arrived in 1867 and began to operate the first synagogue, located in the Calle de San Miguel. Many Jews arrived fleeing from persecution in Morocco instigated by Roghi Bu Hamara. Following the 1868 lifting of the veto of emigration to Melilla from Peninsular Spain, the population further increased with Spaniards. The Jewish population, who also progressively acquired Spanish citizenship, increased to 572 in 1893. The economic opportunities created in Melilla henceforth favoured the installment of a Berber population.
The first body of local government was the junta de arbitrios created in 1879, in which the military enjoy preponderance. The Polígono excepcional de Tiro, the first neighborhood outside the walled core (Melilla la Vieja), began construction in 1888.
In 1893, Riffian tribesmen launched the First Melillan campaign to try to conquer the city; the Spanish government sent 25,000 soldiers to defend it against them. The conflict was also known as the Margallo War, after Spanish General Juan García y Margallo, Governor of Melilla, who was killed in the battle. The new 1894 agreement with Morocco that followed the conflict increased trade with the hinterland, bringing the economic prosperity of the city to a new level. The total population of Melilla amounted to 10,004 inhabitants in 1896.
The turn of the new century saw attempts by France (based in French Algeria) to profit from their newly acquired sphere of influence in Morocco to counter Melilla's trading prowess by fostering trade links with the Algerian cities of Ghazaouet and Oran. Melilla began to suffer from this, to which the instability brought by revolts against Muley Abdel Aziz in the hinterland also added, although after 1905 Sultan pretender El Rogui (Bou Hmara) carried out a defusing policy in the area that favoured Spain. The French occupation of Oujda in 1907 compromised the Melillan trade with that city, and the enduring instability in the Rif still threatened Melilla. Between 1909 and 1945, the modernista (Art Nouveau) style was prevalent in local architecture, making Melilla's streets a "true museum of modernista-style architecture", second only to Barcelona, mainly stemming from the work of architect Enrique Nieto.
Mining companies began to enter the hinterland of Melilla by 1908. A Spanish company, the , was constituted in July 1908, shared by Clemente Fernández, Enrique Macpherson, the Count of Romanones, the Duke of Tovar and , who appointed Miguel Villanueva as chairman. Thus two mining companies under the protection of Bou Hmara started mining lead and iron 20 kilometers (12.4 miles) from Melilla. They started to construct a railway between the port and the mines. In October of that year, Bou Hmara's vassals revolted against him and raided the mines, which remained closed until June 1909. By July the workmen were again attacked and several were killed. Severe fighting between the Spaniards and the tribesmen followed, in the Second Melillan campaign that took place in the vicinity of Melilla.
In 1910, the Spaniards restarted the mines and undertook harbor works at Mar Chica, but hostilities broke out again in 1911. On 22 July 1921, the Berbers under the leadership of Abd el Krim inflicted a grave defeat on the Spanish at the Battle of Annual. The Spanish retreated to Melilla, leaving most of the protectorate under the control of the Republic of the Rif.
A royal decree pursuing the creation of an ayuntamiento in Melilla was signed on 13 December 1918 but the regulation did not come into force, and thus the existing government body, the , remained in force.