Ceuta’s waters are once again a flashpoint between Rabat and Madrid. Spanish media reported that vessels from the Royal Moroccan Navy came close to the city’s coastline on several occasions in late July and early August, in an episode that reportedly almost caused a collision with a Spanish boat. Citing unnamed Spanish sources, the reports describe a frigate escorted by patrol boats, with the presence overlapping the migrant surge of July 30 and 31 and continuing for several days afterward.
In response, Spain is said to have sent the patrol vessel Rayo to Ceuta’s port on August 3, before reinforcing the area with the frigate Santa María, later swapped for the Navarra after a mechanical fault. According to the same accounts, the Moroccan movements eventually stopped once that deployment was in place and after contacts between the two countries’ defense ministries.
The episode revives a dispute that has simmered for decades. No maritime boundary has ever been formally agreed between Morocco and Spain around Ceuta and Melilla. Rabat does not recognize Spanish sovereignty over the two cities, which it regards as occupied Moroccan territory, and has long maintained that no treaty defines the waters surrounding them. That position traces back to Morocco’s broader claim to territorial integrity and its rejection of any residual colonial presence on African soil.
The timing is notable for the Spanish royal household as well. King Felipe VI is reported to have convened his defense minister and senior military officers at the Zarzuela Palace on September 8 specifically to discuss the Ceuta situation. The king and Queen Letizia are also expected to visit Ceuta and Melilla within days, a trip that would mark the first by a Spanish monarch to the two cities in nineteen years, since King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofía’s visit.
Moroccan authorities have offered no official confirmation or denial of the naval movements described in Spanish reporting. As is customary whenever tensions flare around Ceuta and Melilla, Rabat has kept to a posture of quiet firmness rather than public escalation, leaving Madrid to manage the political fallout of a colonial-era file it has yet to resolve.
