His first contact with the European dream was an immense concrete liner stranded on a forecourt of gray slabs: the university hospital center, in the heights of Colmenar, on this spur of northern Africa planted in the Strait of Gibraltar and which belongs to Spain, barely 200 meters from the border with Morocco, his country, which he left by swimming. Full of candor, he is 20 years old and wanders, papers in hand. On his wrists are hospital tags from a week ago. His health check indicates a “suspected food poisoning”but specifies that the examinations found nothing. So much the better. “I come every day. They can’t force a sick person to come home.”he thinks he knows.
He arrived in the Spanish enclave, like 50,000 other migrants, on July 30, caught up in this human tidal wave of unprecedented magnitude which cost the lives of at least 77 people. And don’t plan to leave. There is no question of getting on the buses chartered by the Shereef kingdom, which we pass by the dozens on the national 16, from the Moroccan town of Fnideq to the Spanish customs post – this border that he will not cross in reverse. Officially, some 45,000 migrants have already left. “Voluntarily”say the authorities.
The waste is piling up
A “logistical success” which we hasten to show to the press. La Ribeira, a few sandcastles from the royal walls of Ceuta, serves as a witness beach. Illegal immigrants are rare there. At most a few voyeurs, not always discreet with their phones, who came to photograph a strangeness: women sunbathing topless. From a distance, in this Iberian setting, with its small squares typical of southern Spain, it is not easy to imagine that this territory of barely 15 km² and populated by 80,000 souls has fallen prey to unprecedented submersion.
The cafes have reopened, the metal curtains lowered for two days on Calle Real, the main commercial artery, are raised again. Andalusian tourists on a spree for the weekend return timidly. Only the feria, the highlight of the feast of Our Lady of Africa, a non-working day in Ceuta, was canceled for fear of incidents. Legion soldiers and members of the Guardia Civil patrol but, in the old center, the police are almost bored.
You have to go to the fringes of the city, to more remote neighborhoods, to see the scale of the human surge that Ceuta is still experiencing. Starting with Playa del Trampolin: literally the “diving board beach”, where hundreds of young people, most of them sub-Saharan, look out over Gibraltar in the distance, some 20 kilometers away. We hear a lot of French there, that of the Senegalese and Cameroonians. They play football on the beach or jostle to access the showers set up in the hot sand… “Fuck Europe!” » shouts a migrant, filmed by a German cameraman. A humanitarian approaches to lecture the journalist: “We’re not in a zoo! » The smell is often pestilential. If Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez congratulates himself on having turned back 90% of migrants, the stigma of their passage is everywhere. Waste is piling up: plastic bottles with Arabic labels or identity papers thrown here and there.
The temporary residence center for immigrants is saturated. Behind its gates, under the surveillance of the Guardia Civil, there is a shortage of places. Hundreds of migrants settle under trees or on sidewalks. Others give up waiting nearby. We find them, several kilometers away, camping on the rocks of Benzu, on the western borders of the enclave, near the Moroccan village of Belyounech, facing a completely closed border.
Further on, a group of young Moroccans explains their project. Everyone wants to reach continental Europe. There, they assure, they will have “more rights and a better life”. If the Spanish authorities try to deport them, they will ask for political asylum. Then: France for some, the Netherlands for others, where several say they have family.
The conversation moves in fits and starts. A few words of French, approximate Spanish, a handful of English expressions: a DIY sabir. Long the dominant foreign language in Morocco, French is losing ground. In the north of the kingdom, the Spanish benefit from the proximity of Ceuta. But it is above all English that stands out among the youngest: the language of TikTok and, in their imagination, that of the West.
The situation of Moroccans is, by far, the most favorable. In Ceuta, more than 40% of the population comes from the neighboring kingdom. The city has its mosques, its businesses, its community habits. Here, a Moroccan can go unnoticed. Much more than a Senegalese, immediately recognizable. Abdel and Youssef, 18 and 19 years old, wait under the illuminated sign of a Bingo, in the city center. Funny setting for betting on the future. They say they study in business school in Fez. Their scenario is set: wait for the media attention to subside, for controls to loosen, then try their luck towards mainland Spain. Others found refuge in the vast Muslim cemetery of Sidi Embarek, clinging to the cliffs overlooking the strait. They sleep between the graves and have dug a pit as a latrine. Convinced that no one will dare dislodge them from a sacred place, they have made the tombs their temporary address.
