The king Felipe VI will visit Ceuta and Melilla, ending an institutional hiatus of more than two decades in the two autonomous cities. This was announced this Monday by the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, during an interview on Cadena SER in which he confirmed that the visit has already been discussed with the Head of State, although there is still no specific date for the trip.

One month after the breach of the Tarajal border, through which more than 80,000 people entered in just 48 hours, Ceuta is a city with spirits at rock bottom. The deep feeling of institutional abandonment, combined with high doses of indignation, fear, and uncertainty, has taken over the streets. The same streets where thousands of immigrants continue to wander. The locals, whose August (their peace, their freedom) has been stolen with confinements not decreed by the BOE but by the lack of security, fear that the tension stemming from indignation will break their historic multicultural coexistence. That the crack at the border with Morocco will irreversibly fracture a population whose patience is at its limit due to unfulfilled promises.

February 1972. First official trip of a President of the United States of America to the People’s Republic of China. Richard Nixon lands in a China still immersed in the turbulences of the so-called Cultural Revolution; an agrarian-based country with a very precarious industrial infrastructure, internationally isolated, at odds with the USSR since Stalin’s death in 1953. A collectivized country where almost everyone rides a bicycle. A poor economy that barely represents 9% of the volume of the United States.

As the days go by, the resources to describe a situation that has been repeated since more than 70,000 people irregularly entered Ceuta from Morocco through the El Tarajal beach on July 30 are running out.