Spain has a certain tendency towards atypical borders. The municipality of Llívia or the border by turns — six months French, six Spanish — of the Island of the Pheasants, between Irún and Hendaye are two good examples. In this line, Spanish geography has the curious honor of hosting the shortest border in the world. It is barely 85 meters of sand that separate Spain and Morocco on African land due to the Spanish possession of the Peñón de Vélez de la Gomera.
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The end of the Moroccan Protectorate, signed and executed in the spring of 1956, did not mean the end of all Spanish possessions in North Africa, but only those that were part of the Protectorate. Ceuta and Melilla, incorporated into the Spanish Crown in the 17th and 15th centuries; respectively, were outside the political unity of the Protectorate, like other territories assumed by conquest or that were simply occupied because they were uninhabited. This is the case of Alhucemas, the Chafarinas Islands, or, ultimately, the Peñón de Vélez de la Gomera itself.
The enclave was valuable in the 16th century as a point from which to ambush Mediterranean corsairs
The value of the Peñón in the 16th century was strategically high. In a Mediterranean before the Battle of Lepanto, the rock allowed ambushing corsairs and protecting Spanish interests near the Strait. Conquered in 1508, it was definitively taken for Spain in 1564, in an expedition ordered by Philip II to control North Africa.
And so, since then, the Peñón de Vélez de la Gomera lived as a rock… until one day it woke up as a peninsula.
The uncertainty about how the rock changed its status as a geographical feature is indicative of the loss of relevance to which the passage of years condemned it. An earthquake, or perhaps a storm, between 1930 and 1934 caused a displacement of rocks, earth, and sand that created an isthmus between the Peñón de Vélez and the North African coast. The strip of land between 85 and 88 meters wide — depending on the tide — at its base had no significance until the agreement between Morocco and Spain in 1956 forced the drawing of a border. The isthmus that barely existed 30 years earlier thus became the shortest border in the world.
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Besides physical and political geography, human geography also played a role in the need to establish a territorial limit. Despite its inhospitable appearance, in the 1950s the Peñón de Vélez de la Gomera was inhabited. The 1950 census counted 24 men and nine women, a number far from the 400 and 398 inhabitants recorded in 1910 and 1920, according to data collected by historian Francisco Quirós Linares. The population increased considerably again in the years following 1956, coinciding with the Spanish withdrawal from the Moroccan Protectorate. In 1960 the Peñón had 152 inhabitants, 139 of them men, due to the re-garrisoning that took place in the Spanish territories of North Africa.
Today, the Peñón de Vélez and its 19,000 square meters house a military detachment, a lighthouse, a helipad, a telemedicine team, and remains of old buildings and walls. Since the end of the Protectorate, there have been only two minor international conflicts — over 85 meters, yes, but international — between Rabat and Madrid over the enclave. One in 1958, when Morocco closed the tiny border of the Peñón to cut off supplies. The situation was resolved in four days. The second was on August 29, 2012: seven activists raised four Moroccan flags on the rock. The conflict was closed within hours.
Otherwise, there is no trace of old corsairs… Nor of current migrants.
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