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 (). It was made a
Roman colony in , after which it was sometimes referenced as
Flavia. Rusaddir was said to have once been the seat of a bishop, but there is no record of any bishop of the purported see and it is not included in the
Catholic Church's list of modern
titular sees. 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, and, 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."
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. File:1893-10-30, La Ilustración Española y Americana, Vista general de la plaza de Melilla y de su campo, Venancio Álvarez Cabrera (cropped).jpg File:1893-10-30, La Ilustración Española y Americana, Vista general de la plaza de Melilla y de su campo, Venancio Álvarez Cabrera (cropped 2).jpg 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. A "junta municipal" with a rather civil composition was created in 1927; on 10 April 1930, an
ayuntamiento featuring the same membership as the junta was created, equalling to the same municipal regime as the rest of Spain on 14 April 1931, with the arrival of the first democratically elected municipal corporation on the wake of the proclamation of the
Second Republic. The city was used as one of the staging grounds for
the July 1936 military coup d'état that started the
Spanish Civil War. In the context of the passing of the Ley de Extranjería in 1986, and following social mobilization from the Berber community, conditions for citizenship acquisition were flexibilised and allowed for the naturalisation of a substantial number of inhabitants, until then born in Melilla but without Spanish citizenship.
Autonomy and late 20th, 21st century in Melilla, removed in 2021. In 1995, Melilla —until then just another municipality of
Málaga— became an
autonomous city, as their
Statute of Autonomy was passed. On 6 November 2007, King
Juan Carlos and Queen
Sofía visited Melilla and Ceuta, sparking enthusiasm from the local population and protests from the Moroccan government, which led to a
brief diplomatic conflict. It was the first time a Spanish head of state had visited the two African exclaves since 1927. Melilla, together with Ceuta, declared the Muslim holiday of
Eid al-Adha —Feast of the Sacrifice— an official public holiday from 2010 onward. It is the first time a non-Christian religious festival has been officially celebrated in Spain since the
Reconquista. In 2018, Morocco decided to close the customs office near Melilla, the first time since mid-19th century, without any consultation with Spain. The customs office was expected to reopen in January 2023. As of February 2025, trade was still tentative and limited. Melilla was the location of the last public statue in Spain to commemorate former dictator
Francisco Franco following Spain's
Historical Memory Law, passed in 2007, which included provision to the removal of any artefacts which celebrated the Franco regime from all public buildings and spaces. Nonetheless, the
statue remained on the Cuesta de la Florentina street until its final removal in 2021. == Geography ==