Ceuta, 30 July 2026: anatomy of a foretold collapse

The responsibility of the Government of Spain, the abdication of the European Commission, the vindication of the Schengen partners and Morocco’s unpaid debt

By Gustavo de Arístegui, as published by Atalayar, 6 August, 2026

INTRODUCTION: THE TRUTH WITHOUT ANAESTHESIA

This report is written with the tide gone out and the bodies still arriving at the morgue. Between 30 and 31 July 2026, the Spanish city of Ceuta — 84,000 inhabitants, the European Union’s land and maritime frontier in Africa — suffered the largest migratory irruption ever recorded at a European border: around 50,000 irregular entries in twenty-four hours according to the initial official data, up to 70,000 according to later press estimates, 40,000 according to Morocco itself.¹To grasp the scale: between 2017 and mid-2026, some 20,000 people in total had entered Ceuta irregularly, an average of a thousand a year. In a single day, the equivalent of half a century of ordinary flow came in, and the city’s population came close to doubling between dawn and midnight.²

The human cost is, quite simply, the worst in the history of Europe’s borders: 72 dead according to the Government Delegation, 88 according to the Autonomous City, 79 bodies received at the Institute of Legal Medicine as of today, around one hundred according to the Guardia Civil’s professional associations, with the force’s own estimates expecting the figure to exceed a hundred; eleven more corpses washed up on Moroccan shores.³ People drowned trying to swim around the border breakwaters, and people were crushed to death against the Tarajal seawall — that piece of infrastructure whose inadequacy the Guardia Civil had been denouncing in writing for two decades. That the Spanish State is still unable, five days on, to produce a single figure for its own dead is, in itself, part of the diagnosis.

Let it be said without anaesthesia, because that is what this report is for: none of this was a natural catastrophe, a bolt from a clear sky, or a conspiracy of the «reactionary international». It was a crisis manufactured by human action and omission, with five authors of unequal but concurrent responsibility. First: a Government of Spain that had a full month’s warning, a judicial road map handed down by its own Supreme Court and express alerts from its intelligence services, and did absolutely nothing. Second: a regularisation policy which, in its timing, its scale and its propaganda, turned Spain into the advertised destination of the western Mediterranean. Third: twenty years of systematic contempt, by governments of both colours, for the near-desperate requests of the Guardia Civil regarding the Tarajal seawall. Fourth: a digital mobilisation running to millions of impressions which the security apparatus of two States watched grow in real time without dismantling it. Fifth: a neighbour, Morocco, which at best failed resoundingly in its containment obligations and at worst practised a calculated passivity, and which in either case owes explanations it has not given.

To that list must be added a sixth actor by omission: the European Commission, which in five days went from describing the images as «unacceptable» to congratulating the management, confirming that the guardian of the Treaties has renounced that role whenever the defaulter is politically awkward to name. And it must be said, because it is the truth, that the European partners who have reacted — Italy, Finland, Denmark, France and as many as twenty-two capitals — are right: right in law, right in politics and right in morals. Schengen is not an acquired right; it is a contract of trust, and Spain has broken it.

A word on method, because this report aspires to be incontestable and that demands discipline: everything asserted here is anchored in verifiable facts and cited sources; a distinction is drawn at every point between established fact, indication and analytical judgement; and the same standards of severity are applied to Madrid, to Brussels and to Rabat. Acid criticism without rigour is pamphleteering. Rigour without criticism, with a hundred dead on the table, is complicity. This report will commit neither sin.

The signatory of these lines put the figure of 49,002 entries on record on 31 July, in the first analysis of this series. It was the figure of the National Security Department of the Prime Minister’s own Office. The Executive’s response was to delete it from the official website and summarily dismiss the civil servant who published it.⁴ That single fact foreshadows everything that follows.

CHRONOLOGY OF A CATASTROPHE FORETOLD

Unforeseeable crises do not exist; what exist are governments that decide not to foresee. The sequence that led to 30 July is of a linearity that shames, because every link was public, documented and known to those whose duty it was to act.

On 14 April 2026 the Council of Ministers approved the Royal Decree on the extraordinary regularisation of immigrants in an irregular situation, with an application window from 16 April to 30 June.⁵ On 29 June, the Fifth Section of the Contentious-Administrative Chamber of the Supreme Court settled doctrine: border rejection — the so-called hot returns — cannot be applied to those who reach Ceuta and Melilla by sea, because a person who enters swimming does not surmount any «border containment element» within the meaning of the Tenth Additional Provision of the Aliens Act.⁶ On 30 June the regularisation window closed with 1,174,978 applications, more than double the forecast.⁷ The conjunction of the two dates, twenty-four hours apart, created the perfect sales pitch for the trafficking networks: the administrative door had just closed, and the Supreme Court had just opened the door of the sea.

From late June, according to the report of the International Security Observatory, the first messages about Ceuta were already circulating online; the campaign intensified after publication of the ruling, which acted as an accelerator for a pre-existing network. On 25 July maps with maritime routes were in circulation; on the 29th, timetables, equipment lists and assembly points. The Golden Owl report documented the mobilisation under an explicit slogan — «the kriaj assault on Ceuta», kriaj being the metal fence in Darija — which between 24 and 30 July turned a dispersed Arabic-speaking audience into a large-scale crossing attempt from the beaches and hills of Fnideq and Belyounech, peaking on the 30th, Throne Day. The campaign accumulated eleven million impressions, with active profiles in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and France and comments from the United States.⁸ All of it sat in open sources: any analyst with a telephone could read it. The mafias read it. Tens of thousands of young men read it. Nobody in command in Madrid, it appears, did.

Worse: they did read it. Spain’s intelligence services warned the Government, in the preceding days, of a possible avalanche upon Ceuta and Melilla around the Feast of the Throne, flagging a possible «stroke of magnanimity» by the Alaouite monarch to coincide with the festivity, and reported the unusual arrival of large numbers of buses at Castillejos, the Moroccan town hard against the Ceuta border. The warnings were systematically ignored, and the same military and civilian intelligence sources lament that the Army was not activated at the border from the first moment, underlining that an operation of this scale «is not prepared in four days».⁹ Meanwhile, on the ground, the preceding week was already a full-blown crisis: around 1,500 entries in ten days, more than a hundred minors reaching the city by swimming in a single night, Maritime Rescue and the Red Cross saving 99 people, and the Guardia Civil recovering the thirtieth corpse of the year on the Ceuta shoreline.¹⁰

On 30 July, Throne Day, the collapse came: tens of thousands of people entered via the breakwater and the Tarajal beach, swimming, in inflatable craft and scaling obsolete fences, while Moroccan television broadcast the pomp of the commemoration. The President of Ceuta, Juan Jesús Vivas, called for «rescue», for the declaration of a national emergency and for the State to take single command; the Government refused. The Assembly of Ceuta in its entirety — the PSOE included — demanded the declaration of a situation of interest for National Security under the National Security Act; the Government refused again. Alberto Núñez Feijóo demanded the activation of Article 23 of that Act, the closure of the border and the mobilisation of the Army; Podemos, at the other end of the spectrum, demanded the national emergency and the resignation of the Interior Minister. When Podemos and Vox demand the same thing, and the only one refusing is the Government, the political diagnosis is complete.¹¹

What followed is the chronicle of the chapters to come: the derisory initial reinforcement and the belated militarisation; the official alert of 49,000 entries published and deleted, and its author dismissed; the chain reaction of the European partners; the 48,300 express returns; the dead of the breakwater counted three different ways; the extraordinary videoconference of Interior Ministers on 4 August; and, this very day, the confirmation that the networks which organised the assault remain operational and are calling a new one for 15 August.¹² Table 1 fixes the essential sequence.

Table 1. Essential chronology of the crisis

Date	Event
14-IV-2026	The Council of Ministers approves the Royal Decree on extraordinary regularisation (window: 16 April to 30 June).
29-VI-2026	The Supreme Court settles doctrine: without physical containment elements in the sea there can be no border rejection of swimmers; the ruling itself indicates that installing them would permit it.
30-VI-2026	The regularisation window closes: 1,174,978 applications, more than double the forecast.
Late VI–VII	Growing digital campaign (11 million impressions): routes on 25 July; timetables and assembly points on the 29th. Spanish intelligence warns of buses at Castillejos and of risk tied to the Feast of the Throne. The Government adopts no measure whatsoever.
20/29-VII	A week of forewarning: ~1,500 entries, a hundred minors swimming in on a single night, the year’s thirtieth corpse on the shoreline.
30-VII	Throne Day: mass assault by sea and fence. Vivas requests a national emergency and single command; the Assembly (PSOE included) requests the National Security Act; the Government rejects both. Token initial reinforcement.
31-VII	The DSN publishes the alert of 49,000 entries in 24 hours; it is deleted within hours and its author dismissed. Interior speaks of 50,000. The Army is mobilised. Von der Leyen: «unacceptable» images. Italy announces the suspension of Schengen with Spain; Finland backs it; Denmark contemplates it; France reinforces the border. Albares summons the Italian ambassador, not the Moroccan one.
1-VIII	Sánchez brands the partners’ reaction «selfish, polarising and illegal»; 22 States sign the letter linking the crisis to the ruling and to the regularisation. Interior: 48,300 returned, fewer than 2,000 remain. Mohammed VI presides over a military pageant in Tetouan, 42 km from the chaos.
2/3-VIII	The dead: 72 (Delegation), 88 (City), ~100 (AUGC). Eleven corpses on Moroccan shores. Von der Leyen writes to Sánchez praising the «efficient and effective» management of Spain and Morocco. Morocco acknowledges 40,000 entries and blames mafias, networks and the Supreme Court. Albares accuses the «reactionary international».
4-VIII	Extraordinary JHA videoconference: solidarity with Spain, congratulations for the «swift and effective» response, five lines of work. Italy qualifies its controls: random, on non-EU travellers.
5-VIII	The IML has received 79 bodies; 528 unaccompanied minors identified against 29 reception places; the networks call a new assault for 15 August.

THE LEGAL TRIGGER: A LEGITIMATE RULING AND A MONTH OF CULPABLE PARALYSIS

Let us begin by disabling the handiest alibi: the Supreme Court’s ruling is not the culprit of this crisis. It is a legally impeccable decision, handed down in cassation in the case of an Algerian national intercepted at sea in November 2024, which interprets the Tenth Additional Provision of the Aliens Act in the light of Constitutional Court doctrine and concludes the obvious: a person who enters swimming does not «surmount» any border containment element, because there is none, and therefore the exceptional regime of border rejection cannot be applied to him, but rather the ordinary return procedure, with identification, a case file and presence in Spain while it is processed.⁶ A State governed by the rule of law works like that, and the signatory of this report will not join the chorus of those who fire at judges so as not to look at governors.

Now then: the ruling contained, literally, the solution. The justices wrote that nothing would prevent the application of border rejection if the Administration proceeded to the effective installation of physical containment elements in the sea, artificially placed to delimit and physically protect the border line in the water; and lest any ministry try to slip away behind technology, they clarified that drones, thermal cameras and sensors perform functions of surveillance and alert, not of containment.¹³ That is to say: the High Court did not merely delimit the problem; it handed the Executive the blueprint. Buoys, floating barriers, artificial booms: marina engineering, not rocket science.

What did the Government of Spain do with that blueprint during the thirty-one days between 29 June and 30 July? Nothing. Not one barrier, not one decree-law, not one contingency plan, not one public communication to rebut the narrative the mafias were already selling, not one diplomatic démarche with Rabat to shield the month of exposure, not one reinforcement of personnel in the city. The State Attorney’s Office had litigated the matter all the way to the Supreme Court — unequivocal proof that the Executive knew perfectly well what was at stake —, lost on 29 June, and from that day forward the Government behaved as though the ruling did not exist. The best proof that the maritime barriers were possible before the catastrophe is that the Government itself has embraced them after it: the official post-crisis plan contemplates precisely the installation of physical containment barriers in the sea and the application of rejection to those who surmount them, in accordance with the ruling itself.¹⁴ What today is an urgent plan could have been prevention in July. The difference is measured in corpses.

The effect of the paralysis on the structure of incentives was immediate and foreseeable by any first-year student of analysis. Before 29 June, the young man of Fnideq who took to the water knew that interception meant immediate hand-over to the Moroccan gendarmerie: high cost, zero benefit. Afterwards, interception meant setting foot on Spanish soil and entering a procedure whose effective return rate in the European Union hovers around 28 per cent, as we documented in our July report on immigration and security. The rational calculus inverted overnight, and the trafficking networks — which are firms, with sales departments and market research — monetised it within days. The Guardia Civil’s spokesmen described it with barrack-room precision: a slow trickle since the ruling, an explosion on the 30th. The Interior Ministry itself, in its note of 30 July, admitted that trafficking networks were «instrumentalising a judicial ruling» to stoke the flow; that is, it acknowledged that the trigger was working, thirty days after the fuse was lit and without having lifted a finger to put it out.¹⁵

Thus is fixed the first responsibility, the gravest and the simplest: not that of the court which delivered the ruling, but that of the Government which had a month, a judicial diagnosis, a solution written by the justices themselves, intelligence alerts and a crisis growing in plain sight, and chose silence. In serious chancelleries that has a name: dereliction of duty. In serious democracies it has a consequence: resignation. In Spain, so far, it has claimed only one administrative victim: the civil servant who told the truth.

THE PERFECT PULL EFFECT: REGULARISATION AS A BILLBOARD

The second component of the trigger is the extraordinary regularisation, and here one must be as precise as one is implacable, because the Government has taken refuge in a formalism that does not survive analysis. The facts: the Royal Decree of 14 April 2026 opened a regularisation window for those present in Spain before 1 January 2026 who could evidence five months’ residence; the deadline closed on 30 June with 1,174,978 applications, against unofficial forecasts of around half a million.⁷ It is the seventh extraordinary regularisation in forty years of democracy — 1986, 1991, 1996, 2000, 2001, 2005 and 2026 — and by far the largest of them all.¹⁶

The Government’s defence is of a naivety that would embarrass a first-year intern: nobody who entered after 1 January can benefit, therefore there is no pull effect. La Moncloa’s own official question-and-answer document went so far as to proclaim, in January, that «no pull effect exists» when a clear time frame is set.¹⁷ That thesis confuses the Official State Gazette with reality, and administrative law with mass psychology. The mafias do not sell the decree’s small print: they sell the headline. And the headline, amplified in Darija by the very networks that organised the assault, was irresistible: Spain has just regularised more than a million people; Spain regularises every few years; in Spain, irregularity is not a dead end but an antechamber. Add to this the «harraga» practice — destroying one’s documents before the crossing — which turns any cut-off date into waste paper: without documents there is no proof of the date of entry, and the burden of evidence collapses in administrative practice. The seventh process in forty years is not an exception: it is a pattern, and the pattern is the message.

The sequence of dates adds an almost diabolical element that no analyst has underlined with the bluntness it deserves: the regularisation window closed on 30 June, twenty-four hours after the Supreme Court delivered its ruling. The trafficking networks’ sales script wrote itself: the administrative door has just closed, hurry; and for the stragglers, the Supreme Court has just opened the door of the sea. Two legitimate decisions taken separately — a regularisation process with deadlines and a rights-protective ruling — combined, through sheer governmental improvidence, into the most effective invitation to invasion in living memory. As the signatory of this report dictated in the analysis of 31 July: it was the equivalent of broadcasting a «come and invade me».

That this is not a «reactionary» reading is demonstrated by the most important diplomatic document of the crisis: the letter which twenty-two Member States of the Union — led by Italy and Denmark, with the signatures of Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands, Poland and seventeen others — addressed to Costa, Von der Leyen and the Irish presidency, and which expressly identifies the Spanish regularisation as a pull factor and links it, together with the ruling, to the triggering of the crisis.¹⁸ One may scorn Meloni; it is rather harder to scorn twenty-two European chancelleries, the German one included, subscribing in writing to the diagnosis the Spanish Government dismisses as a hoax.

A final precision, because this report practises no demagoguery even against those who do: regularising settled populations can rest on serious arguments — economic, of legal certainty, of effective control — and we treated them rigorously in our July report. What is condemned here is not the existence of the tool but three very concrete things: its suicidal timing, overlapping with the judicial withdrawal of the principal maritime deterrent; the propagandistic denial of signalling effects which the entire empirical literature and every Interior Ministry in Europe knows to exist; and the disproportion between the joy with which the window was opened and the sloth with which the window was guarded.

TWENTY YEARS IGNORING THE GUARDIA CIVIL: THE BREAKWATER OF SHAME

There are responsibilities of a month and responsibilities of a generation. The third structural cause of the catastrophe belongs to the second category, and this report points to it with the same severity towards all the governments that incubated it: for fifteen or twenty years, the commanders, the operational units and the professional associations of the Guardia Civil denounced, through regulation channels and in writing, that the defences of the Tarajal mole and breakwater were quite simply ridiculous: obsolete fencing, easily scaled and breached, conceived for another era and another scale of pressure. They asked for reinforcements, they asked for works, they asked for doctrine. PSOE and PP governments, in succession, filed the requests away. The southern border was treated as a provincial nuisance, a budgetary irritation, a story for the inside pages.

On 30 July, the Benemérita’s prophecy was fulfilled with notarial exactness: tens of thousands of people scaled and rounded those defences «without difficulty», exactly as the Guardia Civil had warned would happen. But history had something worse in store than technical humiliation: the denounced breakwater became the death trap. There, against that seawall, most of the victims whose bodies now crowd the old Military Hospital turned morgue died crushed and drowned.³ It is not a metaphor: the infrastructure whose inadequacy had sat in the State’s official records for decades is the physical place where the greatest border death toll in European history occurred. Whoever signed budgets that ignored it for twenty years is a structural co-owner of that ledger of the dead, whatever their political colour.

The lessons were available and were spurned one by one. In February 2014, fifteen people drowned on that same Tarajal beach. In May 2021, between eight and nine thousand people entered in two days when Rabat opened its hand in reprisal over the Ghali affair, and Spain had to deploy the Army. In June 2022, dozens died in the assault on the Melilla fence, mostly on the Moroccan side. Three capital warnings in a decade, three occasions to remake the border physically, doctrinally and diplomatically. Nothing substantial was done on any of the three. The Spanish State knew the weakest point of Europe’s only land border with Africa and decided, legislature after legislature, that it was not worth a serious budget line. In July 2026 the bill arrived, with interest.

This, moreover, is the context that disarms the current Government’s favourite alibi: inheritance. It is true that the negligence comes from afar, and this report so records. But it was to this Government that the Supreme Court handed the blueprint of the solution on 29 June; it was this Government that its intelligence warned about the buses at Castillejos; it was this Government that boasted of the best relationship with Rabat in half a century; and it was this Government which, with all those elements on the table, kept the border of 2005 against the threat of 2026. Inherited negligence explains the state of the fence; only its own negligence explains the state of the Government.

CRISIS MANAGEMENT: X-RAY OF A HISTORIC INCOMPETENCE

If the genesis of the crisis portrays an improvident State, its management portrays an impotent Government — and, worse, one bent on denying the evidence of its impotence. Let us review the record of those seventy-two hours, because it admits no mitigation.

First: the refusal to declare the emergency. The President of Ceuta formally requested the national emergency and single command; the Government replied that civil protection legislation does not contemplate that scenario for migratory flows. The argument is a textbook legalistic alibi, dismantlable three ways. One: that very week the Government itself was managing — and winding up — a national emergency over the Ávila and Madrid fires, so the instrument exists, works and is used when convenient.¹⁹ Two: a specific avenue fitted to the case existed, the declaration of a situation of interest for National Security under Article 23 et seq. of the National Security Act, demanded simultaneously by Feijóo and — a devastating datum — by the Assembly of Ceuta unanimously, the local PSOE’s votes included; the Government rejected that too.¹¹ Three: the real reason for both refusals is political, not legal: to declare an emergency is to admit there is an emergency, and this Government has decided that reality is negotiable. The result was a national emergency attended to without being called by its name and, in consequence, without its resources, without its command and without its doctrine.

Second: the operational response. The initial reinforcement was limited to a few dozen personnel — sixty, according to the data this report handled from day one — for a mass counted in the tens of thousands: a ratio that does not even deserve the adjective symbolic. In 2021, for a crisis eight times smaller, two hundred police reinforcements were sent at once in addition to the Army. In 2026, the Army was mobilised in force only when the city was already overrun, against the express criterion of the intelligence services, which had asked for its preventive activation.⁹ There is no kind way to say it: the State arrived late at its own border.

Third: the European help declined. The Home Affairs Commissioner, Magnus Brunner, telephoned Minister Grande-Marlaska on the first day to offer the urgent deployment of the European Border and Coast Guard; the Commission reiterated in writing that Frontex, Europol and the Asylum Agency stood ready to reinforce their presence. The Spanish Government submitted no request whatsoever.²⁰ The very Executive that demanded the partners’ «solidarity» by letter was declining the concrete solidarity sitting on the table. The explanation is as obvious as it is unconfessable: a Frontex presence means Frontex reports — an independent X-ray of the real state of the Spanish border. Opacity was preferred to reinforcement.

Fourth: the statistical chaos. The official alert spoke of 49,000 entries in twenty-four hours; Interior corrected to 50,000; subsequent press estimates raised the episode to between 60,000 and 72,000 people; Morocco acknowledges 40,000; and the official arithmetic of the returns — 48,300 returned, fewer than 2,000 remaining — squares only with the initial figure.¹ As of today, the Spanish State cannot say how many people entered its territory, how many remain or how many have died. The Government’s delegate, asked about unaccompanied minors, admitted he did not have the figure.²¹ A State that cannot count cannot expect to be believed when it says it is in control.

Fifth: the minister. Fernando Grande-Marlaska faced the largest border crisis in European history as an already politically spent minister, obliged to answer in Congress for his links to the Koldo affair and for his management during the Valencia floods.²² In any comparable democracy, an Interior Minister in that condition would not have survived the first week of this catastrophe; in Spain, to date, neither he nor any senior official has assumed any responsibility whatsoever. The only dismissal of the entire crisis is the one examined in the next chapter, and its mere existence constitutes the most eloquent confession this Government has ever made about itself.

Table 2. The dance of official and unofficial figures

Item	Source and date	Figure
Entries in 24 hours	DSN (deleted alert), 31-VII	≈ 49,000
Entries in 24 hours	Interior Ministry, 31-VII	≈ 50,000
Entries (full episode)	Press estimates, 1/5-VIII	60,000 – 72,000
Entries acknowledged	Moroccan authorities, 3-VIII	≈ 40,000
Returned or gone back	Interior Ministry, 1-VIII	48,300
Remaining in the city	Interior Ministry, 1-VIII	Fewer than 2,000
Dead	Government Delegation, 2-VIII	72
Dead	Autonomous City of Ceuta, 3-VIII	88
Bodies received at the IML	Institute of Legal Medicine, 5-VIII	79
Dead (estimate)	AUGC / Guardia Civil, 3-VIII	≈ 100 or more
Corpses on Moroccan shores	Moroccan authorities, 2-VIII	11
Unaccompanied minors identified	National Police, 5-VIII	528
Minor reception places	Autonomous City of Ceuta	29

SHOOTING THE MESSENGER: THE CASE OF THE NATIONAL SECURITY DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL

If one had to choose a single episode to condense the nature of this Government in the face of the crisis, it would not be the fence, nor the breakwater, nor even the refusal to declare the emergency. It would be an administrative dismissal communicated by telephone to a civil servant on holiday.

The facts, verified by multiple outlets: on the morning of 31 July, the head of communications of the National Security Department — a body embedded in the Prime Minister’s Office, where she had served since 2018 — published on the department’s official website an alert which, citing Interior Ministry sources, put at more than 49,000 the number of people who had entered Ceuta irregularly in twenty-four hours via the breakwater and the Tarajal beach, and described the episode as the city’s worst migratory crisis since May 2021. The alert vanished from the website within hours. The official was summarily dismissed, by telephone, on grounds of «loss of confidence». Hours later, the Interior Ministry itself was using the figure of 50,000; in the following days, the estimates rose further still. In other words: the datum was truthful and, if anything, conservative.⁴

Three details aggravate the picture to the point of the grotesque. First: that official is, to this day, the only office-holder dismissed in the entire crisis. Not the Interior Minister on whose watch the border collapsed; not the Foreign Minister who attributed it to an international conspiracy; not a single operational commander. The only head to roll is that of the person who published the truth on official letterhead.²³ Second: since her departure, the public channels of the National Security Department — which used to update information several times a day, even in emergencies — have fallen silent. Spain traversed the largest border crisis in its history with its national security communications organ decapitated by the Prime Minister’s own Office. Third: while dismissing the one who alerted, the Government publicly maintained that the CNI «did not alert», in open contradiction with the military and civilian intelligence sources that document prior and express warnings — the Castillejos buses, the risk tied to the Feast of the Throne — systematically ignored.⁹ In the middle of an emergency, the Executive is waging a narrative war against its own intelligence and information services; a war which, it has now emerged, has escalated into the Council of Ministers itself, with the Defence Minister defending the CNI’s work against an Interior Minister bent on maintaining that there were no warnings.⁴⁴

The analysis barely requires effort, because the episode is this Government’s information doctrine reduced to a single act: the problem is never the border, but the figure; never the crisis, but its visibility. It is the same logic applied to the fires, to the floods and to every emergency of this legislature: manage perception before reality. But this time the lesson reaches the entire apparatus of the State, and it is poisonous: every Spanish civil servant now knows the price of accuracy. A State that punishes its own early-warning system is left, by definition, without an early-warning system. And a democracy in which telling the truth with official data costs you your job, while losing the border costs nobody theirs, has inverted the table of values that sustains it.

THE DEAD OF THE BREAKWATER: THE HUMANITARIAN CATASTROPHE NOBODY WANTS TO COUNT

This chapter ought to come first in any honest reckoning, because above law, geopolitics and domestic politics stand the dead. And the dead of Ceuta are, as of today, a threefold scandal: for their number, for the circumstances in which they died, and for the indignity with which the State is counting them.

The number. The Government Delegation put the dead at 72 on Sunday 2 August. The Autonomous City raised the count to 88 bodies found around the Tarajal breakwater. The Institute of Legal Medicine has already received 79 corpses. The Unified Association of the Guardia Civil speaks of a hundred, and the force’s own estimates, reported by the Ceuta press, expect the final figure to exceed one hundred, as the search for bodies along the breakwater continues. Morocco, for its part, reported eleven corpses washed up on its shores.³ Four different tallies for one tragedy, in the same State, five days on. The discrepancy is no technicality: it is the exact measure of the loss of control.

The circumstances. People drowned trying to swim around the breakwaters, and people died crushed — the word is that one, and it must be written — against the seawall on which tens of thousands pressed simultaneously. Many bodies have been recovered in a condition that hampers identification, to the point that forensic doctors and autopsy technicians have had to be brought in from Cáceres, Valladolid, Salamanca, Albacete and Toledo, the Area Prosecutor’s Office reinforced, and the old Military Hospital fitted out as a morgue.²⁴ In parallel, Moroccan social networks fill with families searching for the missing. The final toll will make this episode the greatest tragedy ever recorded at a European border post: more dead than the Tarajal of 2014 and Melilla of 2022 combined; only the great high-seas shipwrecks exceed it in the continent’s migratory martyrology.

The indignity. With this ledger open and the morgue filling, Spain’s Foreign Minister proclaimed that Italy «would love» to manage a migratory crisis the way Spain has managed this one, and the Union’s Council of Interior Ministers congratulated the Spanish authorities on their «swift and effective» response.²⁵ Let no one seek even-handedness in this report before such obscenity: a political culture capable of self-congratulation with eighty unidentified bodies in a converted military hospital has lost its moral compass. The dead of the breakwater have no party and no flag; they have the right to a State that counts them properly, names them and answers for the conditions in which they died. This report places on record the minimum any serious democracy would already have set in motion: an exhaustive judicial investigation of every death, a parliamentary commission of inquiry into the management, and an answer to the question no member of the Government has been willing to face: how many of those deaths would have been avoided with the maritime barriers the Supreme Court described on 29 June and the reinforcements the Guardia Civil had been requesting for twenty years.

THE MASS RETURNS: THE LEGAL PARADOX NOBODY WANTS TO EXAMINE

Here comes the first of the angles that neither the media nor the analysts have been willing to face squarely, perhaps because it discomfits everyone at once. The Interior Ministry announced that, by 1 August, 48,300 people had been returned to Morocco or had gone back, with fewer than 2,000 remaining in the city.²⁶ Hold on to that datum: the largest and fastest collective return operation in modern European history — forty-eight thousand people in roughly three days — was executed by a Government that styles itself the most rights-protective in Europe, and applauded by the European Commission and twenty-seven Interior Ministers.

The question nobody asks is elementary: under what procedure? The Supreme Court’s ruling of 29 June — the very one the Government invokes as the cause of the crisis — establishes that whoever enters by sea is entitled to the ordinary return procedure: transfer to police premises, identification, the formal opening of a file, legal assistance and an interpreter, and presence in Spain while it is processed. It is materially and humanly impossible to process 48,300 ordinary files in seventy-two hours. The logical alternatives are three, and none leaves the Executive well placed. Either the vast majority of those returned entered over the land fence and border rejection was applied to them — which contradicts every official and journalistic description, all of which place the bulk of entries at the breakwater and the beach —; or these were mass «voluntary returns» — and forty-eight thousand volunteers in three days is a category that demands more faith than analysis, though a part is real: many walked back once they understood that the dreamed-of regularisation did not exist —; or the Spanish State practised, on an industrial scale, precisely what its Supreme Court had just circumscribed. The «clarifying» note Interior published on 3 August on the scope of the ruling betrays the Government’s awareness of its legal exposure.¹⁵

Let us fix the framework, to armour the argument. The European Court of Human Rights, in the Grand Chamber judgment N.D. and N.T. v. Spain of 2020, upheld the immediate return of those who take part in mass, violent assaults exploiting their own culpable conduct where legal entry routes exist. That doctrine gives Convention cover to the response to the storming of the fence; but it does not repeal Spanish domestic law, which since 29 June is more demanding than Strasbourg for maritime entries. And the operational pillar of the whole operation was something else, worth underlining in heavy strokes: Morocco’s consent, which immediately accepted hot returns it had historically refused. Without Rabat’s key, the 48,300 would still be in Ceuta. We shall return to what that means in Chapter XIII.

The purpose of this chapter is not to object to the returns: the signatory of this report holds that a firm response to a mass assault is legitimate, necessary and covered by the 1992 Spanish–Moroccan readmission agreement and by the European case-law cited. What is denounced is the doctrinal schizophrenia of a State that was rights-protective to the point of paralysis during the month when prevention was required, and expeditious to the point of opacity during the seventy-two hours when improvisation was required; and the deafening silence of those who ought to have asked: the Commission, guardian of the Treaties, has not requested a single explanation about the procedure; the organisations that litigated every return between 2014 and 2021 have gone mute; the parliamentary left that made a banner of the Tarajal looks away because the Government is its own. A State without a stable doctrine has no principles: it has reflexes. And reflexes, at borders, are paid for.

There remains the most delicate chapter of the operation: the minors. The Police have already identified 528 unaccompanied foreign minors, delivered into the guardianship of an Autonomous City whose reception system has 29 places.²⁷ Minors cannot be returned like adults: the law, the case-law and the precedent of 2021 forbid it, when the courts annulled the express repatriations of minors and the Ombudsman opened proceedings. Five hundred and twenty-eight children and adolescents in the care of an administration with twenty-nine places, in a city of eighty-four thousand inhabitants with its holding centre overrun, is a humanitarian, legal and social time bomb, armed and ticking, about which the Government of the nation has not said a single substantive word.

THE DIPLOMACY OF THE HOAX: SÁNCHEZ, ALBARES AND THE INVERSION OF REALITY

Every crisis portrays a government, but the rhetoric with which it faces the crisis portrays it twice. The Spanish Government’s deserves a chapter of its own because it constitutes a case study in the inversion of reality: converting one’s own failure into someone else’s affront.

The Prime Minister wrote to the European institutions describing the partners’ reaction as «selfish, polarising and illegal».²⁸ Let the reader dwell on the third adjective: illegal. The measures adopted by Italy and France, or contemplated by Finland — temporary controls at internal borders in the face of serious threats — are expressly and minutely provided for in the Schengen Borders Code, Articles 25 to 29, reformed moreover in 2024 with Spain’s vote in favour. To call the exercise of a Treaty mechanism illegal is either an ignorance of Union law unworthy of a Prime Minister’s Office, or deliberate contempt for the partners’ intelligence. And to request an extraordinary meeting of Interior Ministers in order to complain about the twenty-two States that had requested it to examine Spain is a pirouette that Europe’s chancelleries have read for exactly what it is.

The Foreign Minister raised the stakes to the point of farce. José Manuel Albares attributed the crisis to a «reactionary international» that had allegedly acted in a «coordinated and rapid» manner spreading hoaxes and distorting the Supreme Court’s ruling.²⁹ A Foreign Minister explaining the physical movement of tens of thousands of people by a rhetorical conspiracy of his ideological adversaries: not even in the worst years of third-worldist diplomacy had anything of the kind been heard from a European chancellery. The same minister summoned the ambassador of Italy — a founding partner of the Union, a NATO ally — and did not summon the ambassador of Morocco, the country from whose beaches and under whose jurisdiction the assault departed. It is, to our knowledge, the first time in recent diplomatic history that a Spanish Government has formally protested to the ally that reacted to the crisis and not to the neighbour from which the crisis came.

The repertoire is completed by self-praise and the substitution of declamation for policy. Albares boasted that Italy «would love» to solve Lampedusa the way Spain has solved Ceuta — with the morgue half full —, extolled Rabat’s «total and immediate» readiness, and proclaimed that Ceuta and Melilla are «as Spanish as Valladolid or Santiago de Compostela».²⁵ On the first point, no comment is needed after Chapter VIII. On the second, we take note of the implicit confession: if Morocco could cut the flow and reabsorb 48,000 people immediately afterwards, it could have prevented it beforehand. On the third: the Spanishness of Ceuta and Melilla does not need declarations, it needs budgets, fences, maritime barriers and a foreign policy that does not depend on the neighbour’s mood. To proclaim a city’s Spanishness while neglecting its defence is the diplomatic version of the alibi.

The underlying pattern is the one this analysis has been documenting crisis after crisis: a Government that treats every emergency — fires, floods, now Ceuta — as a communications problem, that seeks adversaries instead of causes and manufactures narrative instead of remedy. Ceuta is the definitive refutation of government-by-narrative, for a reason that fits in one sentence: the sea does not read talking points.

THE PARTNERS ARE RIGHT: SCHENGEN IS NOT AN ACQUIRED RIGHT

We reach the European core of the matter, and this report will say in so many words what most Spanish analysis dares not write: the partners who have proposed suspending free movement with Spain are right. Not rhetorically right: right in law, right in function and right in politics. Whoever is scandalised should first read the Treaty Spain signed.

The architecture is of crystalline logic. Schengen abolishes internal controls because, and only because, each Member State guarantees effective control of the stretch of external border that falls to it. Free movement is not an unconditional right: it is the counterpart of an obligation. As we wrote on 31 July: our border is their border, and theirs is ours. The Schengen Borders Code — Regulation 2016/399, reformed by Regulation 2024/1717 — codifies the consequences: Articles 25 to 28 allow the temporary reintroduction of internal controls in the face of serious threats to public policy or internal security, including, since the 2024 reform, large-scale unauthorised movements of third-country nationals; an immediate procedure exists for unforeseeable cases; and Article 29 contemplates the major scenario: where serious and persistent deficiencies in the control of an external border endanger the functioning of the area as a whole, the Council may recommend internal controls vis-à-vis the defaulting State. This is not theory: it was applied to Greece in 2016, when five States were authorised to maintain controls for two years on account of the deficiencies of Greek control in the Aegean. Spain voted for that acquis. Spain preached it to others. Now Spain must abide it, and that is called the rule of law.

Apply the standard to the facts. A Member State whose external border admits fifty thousand people in twenty-four hours; whose Government refused to activate its own emergency instruments despite the unanimous request of the territory affected; which declined the operational help of Frontex offered on day one; which cannot specify how many people entered or how many remain; and which needed the neighbour’s benevolence to restore control, objectively fits — without straining a comma — the Code’s language of «serious deficiencies». The partners’ responses have, moreover, been scrupulously proportionate. Italy, after its initial announcement, gave concrete form to its «suspension» as random checks at ports and airports on non-EU travellers, affecting neither Spanish nor Union citizens: a textbook use of the mechanism Madrid brands illegal.³⁰ Finland, through its Interior Minister, stated that Spain has failed completely in protecting the external border: harsh, and accurate.³¹ Denmark, through Mette Frederiksen, asked that all options be considered, including the suspension of Schengen cooperation with Spain: the responsible formulation of one who takes the contract seriously. France, without fanfare, activated its Rapid Intervention Border Force and reinforced controls from the first night, though it later kept its distance from the collective letter: the quiet, effective version of the same distrust. Germany and Sweden asked Sánchez to regain control; the Netherlands and Belgium, to protect the common border.³¹

And then there is the document history will retain: the letter of the Twenty-Two. Twenty-two Member States out of twenty-seven — Italy and Denmark at the head, with Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands, Poland, Austria, Greece and fourteen others — requesting an urgent meeting in writing, linking the crisis to the Spanish ruling and the Spanish regularisation, and declaring themselves ready to reinforce or reintroduce controls at their internal borders.¹⁸ When the Spanish Government dismisses that as a «reactionary international», it is insulting, among others, the German Chancellor and half of Nordic social democracy. Twenty-two out of twenty-seven is not a plot: it is a verdict. It is the collegiate finding that trust — the only currency in which Schengen is paid — is broken, and that Madrid broke it.

The conclusion of this chapter, without euphemism: those who call for the activation of the safeguard mechanisms against Spain are within their rights and within the truth. Not because Spain should be expelled from Schengen — no expulsion mechanism exists, and nobody serious proposes it — but because the Treaty’s own logic demands consequences for demonstrated incapacity, and because the partners’ controls are not a punishment: they are insurance. The shortest way for Spain to be rid of them runs not through indignant letters from La Moncloa but through making them unnecessary: barriers, means, doctrine and a government that governs. A final note on the Council of 4 August: Spain boasts of having wrung «solidarity» from the partners and a set of kindly conclusions; read those conclusions with a magnifying glass and you will see that the five approved lines of work — reinforcement of external borders, returns, cooperation with third countries, early warning, the fight against the mafias — are, point by point, the agenda of the letter of the Twenty-Two on Council letterhead.³² Madrid won the communiqué; Rome and Copenhagen won the acquis.

Table 3. The European partners’ positions in the crisis

Actor	Position adopted
Italy	Announces the suspension of Schengen with Spain; gives it concrete form as random checks on non-EU travellers at ports and airports; accelerates the «Albania model» of return centres in third countries.
Finland	Backs Spain’s exclusion from Schengen; its Interior Minister speaks of a complete failure to protect the external border.
Denmark	Frederiksen asks that all options be considered, including suspending Schengen cooperation with Spain; co-leads the letter of the 22.
France	Reinforces border controls from the first night and activates the Rapid Intervention Border Force; does not sign the letter of the 22.
Germany and Sweden	Demand that Sánchez «regain control» of Ceuta; sign the letter of the 22.
Netherlands and Belgium	Call for the protection of the common external border; sign the letter of the 22.
The 22 signatories	Link the crisis to the Supreme Court ruling and to the regularisation; declare readiness to reinforce or reintroduce internal controls.
European Commission	From «unacceptable» on 31 July to «efficient and effective» on 3 August and the Council’s congratulations on the 4th; Frontex offered and not requested.
Spain	Brands the partners’ reaction «selfish, polarising and illegal»; summons the ambassador of Italy and not the ambassador of Morocco; declines Frontex’s help.

THE EUROPEAN COMMISSION: FROM «UNACCEPTABLE» TO «EFFICIENT AND EFFECTIVE» IN SEVENTY-TWO HOURS

If the Spanish Government has risen to the level of the disaster, the European Commission has risen to the level of its own decadence. Its record in this crisis admits of an exact chronology that portrays it without need of adjectives, though this report will not spare them.

Friday 31 July: Ursula von der Leyen declares that the images coming out of Ceuta are «unacceptable», demands that Spain put an immediate end to irregular entries and swiftly return the migrants, and offers the deployment of Frontex.³³Monday 3 August: the same president writes to Pedro Sánchez praising the «efficient and effective» management of the crisis by the Spanish and Moroccan authorities, reminding him — with the elegance of one who leaves a record — that European help was offered «from the very first moment» and remains unrequested.³⁴ Tuesday 4 August: the conclusions of the extraordinary Council, with the Commission assisting, congratulate Spain on its «swift and effective» response and declare the situation under control.³² From the unacceptable to the exemplary in seventy-two hours, with nothing changing on the ground except the political cost of maintaining the truth. An institution whose assessment of one and the same catastrophe depends on the day’s diplomatic weather is not a guardian: it is a weathervane.

The surrender has four dimensions worth itemising. First: the renunciation of the role of guardian of the Treaties. Faced with border deficiencies of this magnitude, the Commission possesses instruments — Schengen evaluations, recommendations, the Article 29 mechanism, ultimately infringement proceedings — and has not so much as hinted at activating them. Let readers ask themselves the uncomfortable question: had this crisis, with this management and these dead, occurred in PiS’s Poland or Orbán’s Hungary, how many files would Brussels have opened by now? The double standard is not a cosmetic defect of the Commission: it is its autoimmune disease, the one that destroys its authority precisely when it needs it most. Second: the genuflection before Rabat. Von der Leyen asked for Morocco’s «collaboration», praised its management in the same sentence as Spain’s and carefully avoided any allusion to Moroccan responsibility in the genesis of the disaster; the generic warning that the Union will not accept the use of illegal immigration as an instrument of pressure was formulated without a subject, which is the Brussels way of not formulating it.³⁴ «Instrumentalisation» was defined in the Pact so vaporously that — as we warned in our July report on the seven deep flaws of the common migration policy — it could never be applied to a partner who sells fisheries, energy and counter-terrorism cooperation. The first live test has confirmed it: the concept exists in order not to be used.

Third: the irrelevance of the Pact on Migration and Asylum at its first contact with reality. Faced with the largest border crisis in the Union’s history, nobody — not the Commission, not Spain, not the partners — operatively invoked the brand-new Pact: the States went straight to the national controls of the Borders Code, that is, to the pre-Pact world. De facto voluntary solidarity, the 28 per cent return rate, the absence of legal pathways to decompress, the confusion of management with strategy: every structural flaw we documented two weeks ago has materialised in seven days, with a precision the signatory would rather not have possessed. Fourth: organic impotence. Frontex, Europol and the Asylum Agency «stand ready» to help when Spain asks, Brussels repeats; Spain does not ask; and there the story ends. A Union whose agencies can act only where the defaulter invites them is a complete institutional metaphor: capabilities without authority, budget without power, communiqués without consequences. An involuntary cherry on top: among the five priority areas Von der Leyen lists in her letter is the implantation of early-warning systems; she was writing it to the Government that had just dismissed its early-warner. The finest satirist could not have drafted it better.

The balance for Brussels is devastating and transcends this crisis: every episode in which the Commission acts as notary of failures rather than guarantor of obligations transfers European migration policy, de facto, from the common institutions to the national interior ministries. The letter of the Twenty-Two is the future of European migration policy; the Commission has chosen to be its stenographer.

MOROCCO: NEITHER PROVEN ORCHESTRATOR NOR INNOCENT PARTNER

This chapter demands maximum methodological rigour precisely because it will be the harshest on Rabat ever written in this series. Harshness without evidence is propaganda; evidence without harshness, when it weighs what it weighs here, is cowardice. Let us therefore distinguish, with professional discipline, between the proven, the indicative and the exculpatory, and then draw the verdict the facts impose.

First, the precedent, because it fixes the burden of proof. In May 2021 the evidence of deliberate action by the Moroccan State was overwhelming: controls relaxed to order, filmed police passivity, the context of reprisal for the sheltering of the Polisario leader, and Ambassador Benyaich’s phrase about acts that have consequences. A State that has already once used its own population as an instrument of pressure against its neighbour does not appear before the 2026 episode with a presumption of innocence: it appears with a record. The burden of showing that this time was different rests on Rabat, and Rabat has not discharged it.

Second, the proven and the indicative in the present episode, which is much, and grave. One: the prior concentration was visible and was detected: Spanish intelligence reported the unusual arrival of large numbers of buses at Castillejos in the preceding days, and thousands camped in the hills of Fnideq and Belyounech; nothing of the sort happens in the Alaouite kingdom without the knowledge of its services, which are among the most capillary in the Arab world.⁹ Two: the summons was public: a campaign of eleven million impressions broadcasting dates, times, departure beaches and equipment, legible by any gendarme with a telephone.⁸ Three: Morocco not only could see: it chose to watch. According to published reports, Rabat positioned two military observation satellites over the Strait during the events, monitoring in real time the entry of tens of thousands of people into Ceuta; and it moved military aircraft to Tetouan in mid-crisis.³⁵ The neighbour observed the tide in centimetre resolution and did not move its forces to stop it. Four: the capacity to stop it is demonstrated by Morocco itself: in the «TikTok avalanche» of 2024, its services identified 4,455 people around Fnideq and made arrests within days, aborting the call-up; in 2026, faced with a mobilisation fifteen times larger and more loudly advertised, that machinery did not turn up.⁸ Five: the coincidence with the Feast of the Throne, with the King presiding over a mass military pageant in Tetouan 42 kilometres from the chaos, admits two readings and both are bad: either the security apparatus was consecrated to the liturgy while the border burned — negligence — or the demographic pressure was allowed to vent towards the neighbour on the kingdom’s most symbolic date — calculated passivity.³⁵ Six: the conduct afterwards: no investigation announced, no responsibility assumed, no explanation of how tens of thousands of people crossed its territory, embarked from its beaches and massed at its fence unimpeded; instead, an official narrative that blames the mafias, the social networks and the Spanish Supreme Court — everyone but itself —, the dissemination by the official agency MAP of Felipe VI’s protocol congratulations to Mohammed VI at the height of the crisis, a textbook intoxication manoeuvre aimed at Spanish opinion, and tolerance of a digital manhunt that issues death threats against Ceuta residents and posts €30,000 bounties for identifying them.³⁶

Third, the exculpatory, which exists and which this report records because its analytical solidity depends on it. The immediate acceptance of hot returns — historically and systematically refused by Rabat — and the reabsorption of 48,300 people in three days are incompatible with a 2021-style coercion operation: whoever orchestrates a crisis to extract concessions collects before closing the tap, and here the tap was closed for free. Morocco’s own costs are real: eleven corpses on its shores, 40,000 entries officially acknowledged, and the planetary humiliation of the reign’s sacred anniversary being associated for ever, in split screen, with the stampede of its own young people fleeing the kingdom. The Golden Owl report, moreover, describes a horizontal mobilisation without central command. And the strategic context deactivates the classic motive: after Security Council Resolution 2797 and the fifty-plus recognitions of its sovereignty over the Sahara, Morocco is more consolidated than ever and needs manufactured incidents less than ever. Precisely for that reason — and this is the turn Rabat will not want to read — its passivity is less excusable, not more: the weak Morocco of 2005 could plead being overwhelmed; the triumphant Morocco of 2026, with its own satellites over the Strait, can plead nothing.

The verdict, then, with the precision of a judgment: acquitted of orchestration, for want of conclusive proof; convicted of grave breach of its duties of neighbourhood and partnership, with the aggravating circumstance of contextual recidivism and the supreme aggravation of the refusal to render account. In the best case, Morocco starred in the most resounding security failure of its recent history and refuses to acknowledge it; in the worst, it let it happen. A strategic partner is defined not by the efficiency of its after-sales service — those accepted returns for which Madrid gives thanks with genuflections — but by prevention; and prevention failed or was withheld. Spain, moreover, must draw two cold lessons its Government refuses to formulate. The first: the 2022 turn on the Sahara, sold as the insurance premium of a new era, bought no protection whatsoever on 30 July; concessions to Rabat buy good quarters, not good years. The second and graver: by accepting that the restoration of border control should depend on Moroccan consent, Spain has consummated a genuine subcontracting of sovereignty; the key to the reversibility of this crisis — and of the next — sits today in Rabat, and what the neighbour’s discretion has given, the neighbour’s discretion can withdraw. No serious country leaves the lock of its own house on another’s key-ring.

THE OTHER TRUTH OF CEUTA: A FOUR-CULTURE SPANISHNESS THAT REFUTES RABAT AND THE CLICHÉS

The crisis has resurrected, in Rabat, in some European newsrooms and in more than one lazy chancellery, the falsest cliché of the western Mediterranean: the notion that Ceuta is, deep down, a demographically «Moroccan» city provisionally administered by Spain, whose Spanishness rests on the «Christian» half of its census and against the latent will of the other half. This chapter refutes it with data, with ballot boxes and with names, because no defence of Ceuta will be solid unless it stands on the city’s sociological truth; and that truth is the exact opposite of the cliché: Ceuta’s Muslim population feels as Spanish as, or more Spanish than, its Christian, Jewish or Hindu population, and it is, moreover, overwhelmingly conservative. Whoever wishes to dispute this thesis will first have to dispute thirty years of election results.

Begin with demography, without complexes and without tricks. According to the demographic study of the Andalusí Observatory (UCIDE), 35,561 Muslims reside in Ceuta — around 43 per cent of a population of some 83,000 — of whom 31,163, almost nine in ten, are Spanish citizens.³⁸ The Christian community accounts for about half the census; the Jewish community, of Sephardic root and documented presence over centuries, and the Hindu community, established for more than a hundred and twenty-five years, complete the celebrated four cultures. The trend, moreover, is unequivocal: the recent Macarrón–Leguina report for CEU-CEFAS estimates that the population of Muslim origin is already a majority among children and the young and that more than eighty per cent of newborns bear Muslim names.³⁹ This report does not hide that datum; it underlines it: the Ceuta of the future will be more Muslim than today’s, and precisely for that reason it matters so much to establish, rigorously, what Ceuta’s Muslims vote, feel and want. The answer discomfits Rabat and the doom-mongers in equal measure.

First evidence: the ballot box, the only referendum held every four years for three decades. Table 4 summarises the thirty years of Assembly elections since the 1995 Statute of Autonomy, and its reading admits no two interpretations. The Partido Popular has been the most-voted force in every autonomous election held since 1995 with a single exception — the populist parenthesis of the GIL in 1999 — and Juan Jesús Vivas has presided over the city since February 2001: an uninterrupted quarter-century of centre-right government.⁴⁰ Note the detail that pulverises the cliché: the PP’s absolute majorities of 2003, 2007 and 2011 — 62.55, 65.18 and 65.20 per cent of the vote — are arithmetically impossible without a massive Muslim vote in a city whose census is more than forty per cent Muslim. Tens of thousands of Muslim Ceutans have voted, election after election, for Spain’s conservative party par excellence. That is the «occupation» denounced by Moroccan irredentism: a city that votes, freely and en masse, to go on being what it is.

Table 4. Thirty years of elections to the Assembly of Ceuta (25 seats)

Year	PP	PSOE	Localists with mainly Muslim electorates*	Others	Resulting presidency
1995	9	3	0 (CEM: 3.87%, no seat)	PFC 6, CEU 4, PSPC 2, PDSC 1	Basilio Fernández (PFC); from 1996, Jesús Fortes (PP)
1999	8	2	0	GIL 12, PDSC 3	Fortes (PP); August: Antonio Sampietro (GIL); 2001: Juan Vivas (PP) by motion of censure
2003	19	2	UDCE 3	PDSC 1	Vivas (PP), absolute majority (62.55%)
2007	19	2	UDCE-IU 4	—	Vivas (PP), absolute majority (65.18%)
2011	18	3	Caballas 4	—	Vivas (PP), absolute majority (65.20%)
2015	13	4	Caballas 4, MDyC 3	Ciudadanos 1	Vivas (PP), absolute majority (45.77%)
2019	9	7	MDyC 2, Caballas 1	Vox 6	Vivas (PP), most-voted list
2023	9	6	MDyC 3, Ceuta Ya! 2	Vox 5	Vivas (PP), proclaimed as head of the most-voted list (Art. 15 of the Statute)

* CEM: Muslim Electoral Coalition; UDCE: Ceutan Democratic Union; MDyC: Movement for Dignity and Citizenship. Every localist formation with a mainly Muslim electorate that has won representation is a Spanish, constitutionalist party.

Second evidence, more conclusive still: in thirty years of autonomous democracy, no candidacy advocating Ceuta’s integration into Morocco has ever won a single seat. The only explicitly confessional formation, the Muslim Electoral Coalition, reached 3.87 per cent in 1995, won no representation and disappeared.⁴⁰ The localist parties with mainly Muslim electorates that have won seats — Mohamed Alí’s UDCE, Caballas, Fátima Hamed’s MDyC, Ceuta Ya! — are Spanish formations that litigate over budgets, housing, employment and dignity before Madrid and before the Assembly, not against Spain; their combined historical ceiling is four or five seats out of twenty-five. And the symmetrical datum completes the picture on the right: Vox takes more than twenty per cent of the autonomous vote in Ceuta and has won the city’s single seat in Congress at the last two general elections. A city with a forty-three per cent Muslim census where the parliamentary arc runs from the PP to Vox by way of constitutionalist localists, and where the pro-Moroccan option does not exist electorally, is not a city in dispute: it is a city that has decided.

Third evidence: declared identity. The available survey research — from the official barometers on the Muslim community to the academic work on Ceutan identity — all points the same way: no serious poll has ever put below four in five the proportion of Ceutans who wish to remain Spanish, and the religious variable alters the intensity of the sentiment, not its direction. The official barometer on the Muslim community in Spain recorded that eighty-nine per cent consider it perfectly compatible to be a good Muslim and a good Spaniard, in a population described by the researchers themselves as tolerant, westernised and respectful of the institutions.⁴¹ The academic literature on Ceuta documents a proud double identity — Muslim and Ceutan, that is, Spanish — whose principal demand is not to separate from Spain but to be fully recognised within it.⁴² It is worth recalling, moreover, that Ceuta’s Spanishness was born of a choice: when Portugal separated from the Hispanic Monarchy in 1640, it was the Ceutans themselves who decided to remain under Spanish sovereignty.⁴³ Almost four centuries later, their descendants of the four cultures go on choosing the same thing every four years.

Fourth evidence: the names and the offices, because the Muslim Spanishness of Ceuta is not a statistical abstraction but the very fabric of the city’s institutions. The Ceuta spokesman of the majority association of Guardia Civil officers — the corps that has left its skin on the breakwater and whose warnings Madrid ignored for twenty years — is a Muslim. So is the secretary-general of the college of Ceuta’s physicians, the same doctors who these days are certifying the corpses of the Tarajal. Muslims sit as councillors in the successive Partido Popular governments of Juan Vivas, and the city’s Treasury has for years been run by Kissy Chandiramani, a Ceutan of the Hindu community; the progressive opposition has been led by Fátima Hamed, the first Muslim woman to head a group in a Spanish parliament; and the city’s delegate of the Islamic Commission of Spain exchanges public Ramadan greetings with the city’s Presidency every year.⁴² Guardia Civil officers, physicians, councillors, deputies: Ceuta’s Muslims are not the object of Ceuta’s Spanishness; they are its holders, its public servants and, too often these days, its victims.

From all the above follows the conclusion this report elevates to a thesis, formulated without a single courtesy clause: Ceuta’s Muslim population feels as Spanish as, or more Spanish than, Ceuta’s Christian, Jewish or Hindu population — whose Spanishness nobody disputes — and is overwhelmingly conservative in its values, its customs and its vote. That double truth demolishes three discourses at once. It demolishes Rabat’s irredentism, because it reveals that its territorial claim has no people behind it: there is no Ceutan demos aspiring to Morocco, and an annexation would be carried out against the express will of every community in the city, beginning with the Muslim one, which has voted with its feet — towards Spain — and with its ballots — for Spain — for generations; the spectacle of tens of thousands of young Moroccans risking their lives to enter Spanish Ceuta is, for the rest, the cruellest imaginable refutation of the propaganda that presents the city as a captive yearning for «liberation». It equally demolishes the insult of those who, from the opposite extreme, dismiss Muslim Ceutans as «ID-card Spaniards» in need of «re-Hispanicisation»:⁴² ID-card Spaniards are, if anyone, those who need to inspect another man’s papers to measure his patriotism; the Muslims of Ceuta serve Spain in the Guardia Civil, heal her in their hospitals and govern her in their councillorships. And it demolishes, finally, the alibi of abandonment: if the southern border deserves barriers, means and doctrine, it is not only by abstract reason of State, but because behind the fence lives the oldest, most loyal and most unequivocally Spanish Muslim community in Europe, which is the first casualty of every crisis — in its coexistence, its economy, its security and now even its physical safety, with residents threatened with death and priced on the networks across the border.

A final precision, because rigour obliges even when the datum discomfits one’s own thesis: none of the above licenses complacency. Demographic change is real and accelerating; the socio-economic gaps between communities, differential school failure and unemployment are real; and coexistence, as this crisis has shown, does not sustain itself. But the correct conclusion from those data is the inverse of the one drawn by the prophets of the clash: a city whose emerging majority is Muslim and wants to be Spanish is the greatest strategic asset Spain possesses vis-à-vis Morocco and Europe’s best argument on its southern frontier, on condition that the State invests in it — in its schools, its employment, its security and its dignity — what for decades it has denied it. To defend Ceuta is, before all else, to defend the Ceutans; and by this point in the report it is well established who has spent twenty years failing to do so.

THE ANGLES NOBODY HAS WANTED TO LOOK AT

Every great event produces a zone of shadow: what the media do not cover for haste, governments conceal out of interest and analysts skirt out of laziness or fear. This chapter walks that zone, because it is where the next crisis is being decided.

First: the returned jihadists. Among those who entered Ceuta, individuals linked to jihadism who had previously been expelled from Spain have been identified, according to the press.³⁷ Let the reader reflect on what that means: persons expelled from national territory on security grounds have re-entered by assault, camouflaged in a mass of tens of thousands, in an operation in which individual security screening is an arithmetical fiction. Our July report documented, with TE-SAT data, the complexity of the immigration–terrorism nexus, which demands rigour and rejects both hysteria and denial; well, the re-entry by avalanche of expelled radicals is a textbook case, of maximum gravity, which in any serious democracy would already have produced urgent appearances by the Interior Minister and the director of the CNI. In Spain it has produced silence.

Second: the «harraga» practice and the impossible census. The deliberate destruction of documents before the crossing — a standardised practice the networks themselves broadcast — defeats identification, age assessment, the attribution of nationality for readmission purposes and any administrative cut-off date. When the Government states that «fewer than 2,000 remain», it is uttering an act of faith, not a census: without verified identities or individualised exit control, the State does not know with certainty who entered, who left and who has melted into the city or slipped across to the peninsula. The official figure for those remaining is the most fragile of all the fragile figures of this crisis; and yet upon it rests the entire narrative of «control regained».

Third: 15 August is already convened. The reports on the digital campaign agree that the networks which organised the assault remain intact and operational, and that a call for a new mass assault on 15 August is already circulating on them.¹²The crisis, then, is not over: it is between waves. Everything not fixed within ten days — the maritime barriers, the doctrine on the use of force, Rabat’s written commitment, the minors’ arrangements — will be tested again, this time without the mitigation of surprise. If 15 August repeats 30 July, not even the most indignant letter from La Moncloa will prevent the activation of Article 29.

Fourth: the blackout of the alert system. Since the dismissal of its communications chief on 31 July, the public channels of the National Security Department have ceased updating.²³ Spain has traversed — and is still traversing — its greatest border security crisis with the Prime Minister’s Office’s alert organ voluntarily struck dumb. That the first informational casualty of the crisis was inflicted by the Government on its own system should figure in the manuals of what a State must never do to itself.

Fifth: the playbook is exportable. Ceuta 2026 has validated, in full view of every hostile actor on the planet, a new operating model: horizontal digital mobilisation without central command, arbitrage of the target State’s legal windows, and mass simultaneity that saturates any conceivable police deployment. Belarus industrialised the state instrumentalisation of migration in 2021; Ceuta 2026 demonstrates swarm instrumentalisation, with no state fingerprints to sanction. The playbook works against any coastal weak point of Schengen: Lampedusa, the Aegean and, above all, the Canaries, where no readmission machinery comparable to Morocco’s exists and where an avalanche on this scale would be, quite simply, irreversible. Europe’s adversaries — state and criminal — have taken notes; the question is whether Europe has too.

Sixth: the arithmetic of demographic shock. Close to 50,000 arrivals in twenty-four hours upon a city of 84,000 inhabitants constitutes the first case in modern Europe of a jurisdiction seeing its population nearly double in a day through irregular entry. No protocol of civil protection, health, public order or supply contemplates that scenario. Spanish and European emergency doctrine must incorporate, forthwith, the category of sudden demographic shock, with predefined thresholds, commands and resources; not to do so after Ceuta would be negligence elevated to method.

Seventh: the economic bill of distrust. Every control reintroduced at the internal borders — France, Italy, those to come — is direct friction upon the first national industry, tourism, and upon transport and exports. Spain has lived off Schengen as off an annuity; the crisis shows the annuity has conditions, and that unseriousness is paid in points of GDP. The cost of the maritime barriers that were not installed is measured in millions; the cost of the distrust their absence has generated will be measured in thousands of millions.

Eighth: statistics as hostage. The dismissal of the DSN official has a systemic effect that transcends the case: from now on, every official Spanish datum in a crisis will be read — by partners, by markets, by citizens — with the discount applied to a State known to delete the awkward figure and dismiss its author. A State’s statistical credibility is an asset that takes decades to build and one telephone call to destroy. That call has been made.

Ninth: the city and its cohesion. Ceuta — four cultures, a coexistence worked at for generations — has been wounded: businesses shuttered for days, the migrant holding centre overrun with fights and encampments at its gates, protests and counter-protests, residents named and targeted in a cross-border digital manhunt, and the immediate arrival of political tourism of every stripe.³⁶ The social cohesion of the autonomous cities is a strategic asset of Spain as much as its fences, and it has been managed with the same sloth. Note, too, the political consequence this analysis has been anticipating for years: every border the moderates fail to manage ends up being managed, at the ballot box, by the extremes; the best vaccine against the pied pipers of extremism is the competence of serious governments, and that vaccine has been out of date for weeks.

Tenth: the two clocks. Spain dismantled its permanent instrument of maritime deterrence to the rhythm of a judicial clock — one day, 29 June — and as of today has not assembled the substitute, which runs to the rhythm of an administrative clock with no date. A State that lives between two clocks is governed by whoever controls the stopwatch: the mafias, which operate in hours, and Rabat, which decides in days. To recover one’s own clock — to legislate, to build, to deploy — is the exact definition of recovering sovereignty.

SCENARIOS AND OUTLOOK

Short term (August 2026). The critical date is 15 August, a call already in circulation. If the wave repeats and again overwhelms the deployment, the European sequence is foreseeable: a multiplication of internal controls under Articles 25 to 28, an accelerated Schengen evaluation of Spain and the opening of the Article 29 route with the Greek precedent of 2016 as template; in parallel, a government crisis in Madrid, with Grande-Marlaska as the designated fuse and a pressure — contained today — that would reach the Prime Minister himself. If, on the contrary, the call fizzles or is contained — which would require provisional barriers already moored, preventive military deployment and an operational Moroccan commitment that today is merely verbal — the Government will proclaim the return to normality and bury the responsibilities. The probability of it assuming them of its own motion is, on the evidence of this legislature, nil: only parliamentary arithmetic or a second wave can force them.

Medium term (autumn 2026). Four fronts. First, the legislative: the PP’s bill to reform the Aliens Act and restore maritime border rejection will collide with the investiture majority; the Government will attempt the regulatory and public-works route — the barriers the Supreme Court described — and the real metric of seriousness will be a single one: whether or not, by autumn, physical containment elements are moored off the Tarajal. Second, the bilateral: operational cooperation with Rabat will continue, because it suits both, but Spain’s structural dependence will have deepened; without a written instrument with verifiable prevention obligations — which Morocco has no incentive whatsoever to sign — Spain will go on living off another’s discretion. Third, the European: the Pact on Migration and Asylum emerges from this crisis mortally wounded in its credibility; the real agenda will be set by the Twenty-Two — returns, externalisation, the third-country centres model Italy is accelerating — and the practical definition of «instrumentalisation» will be written by the States’ faits accomplis, not by the Commission. Fourth, the domestic: commissions of inquiry, judicial proceedings over the deaths and the battle for the narrative of the dead, which this Government will try to administer as it administered the entry figure.

Three scenarios at twelve months. Scenario one, precarious containment (estimated probability: 55 per cent): the barriers are installed late but installed, 15 August is contained or remains a minor episode, the internal controls are lifted within months, nobody assumes responsibility and the lesson goes unlearned until the next window of opportunity, which the mafias are already seeking on the map. Scenario two, repetition and rupture (30 per cent): a second mass wave — on 15 August or another date — again overwhelms the deployment; the Council activates Article 29 and Spain is formally designated a deficient border of the Union; a major political crisis in Madrid, with electoral consequences. Scenario three, serious correction (15 per cent): emergency legislation with PP–PSOE consensus, real border works, a written pact with Rabat and full integration into the European early-warning mechanisms; it would require a political will of which this Government has given not a single sign in the entire legislature, for which reason it is assigned the lowest probability, with the melancholy of one who would rather be wrong.

CONCLUSION: THE PRICE OF FRIVOLITY

Time to close, and we close as we opened: without anaesthesia. What has happened in Ceuta between 30 July and today is not one more migratory crisis: it is the simultaneous breach of three contracts. The internal contract between the Spanish State and its citizens, who pay taxes in exchange for defended borders, emergencies declared when they exist and truths told when they hurt. The European contract between Spain and its partners, who abolished their controls in exchange for Madrid guarding the southern stretch of the common perimeter. And the contract of neighbourhood between Spain and Morocco, which trades cooperation for prevention and has been reduced to an after-sales service that Rabat grants and can withdraw. All three contracts have been broken, by act or omission, by the party that most loudly boasted of honouring them.

This report maintains, with all the facts set out in its sixteen preceding chapters, a judgement it already advanced in the heat of events and which the accumulated evidence has only hardened: no such display of incompetence, incapacity and witlessness in the handling of a crisis of this nature had been seen in any European government since the end of the Second World War. This is not hyperbole: it is an inventory. A month of warning squandered with the solution written by the Supreme Court itself; the intelligence alerts ignored and then denied; the emergency refused against the unanimous petition of the territory, local PSOE included; the initial reinforcement reduced to a few dozen personnel; Frontex’s help declined; the only dismissal, that of the civil servant who told the truth; the count of the dead, quadruplicated; and, as a crowning touch, a minister boasting to Italy about the management while the old Military Hospital filled with corpses. Each of those facts, in isolation, would be the scandal of a legislature; together they compose the portrait of a State governed by frivolity.

To the European partners who have reacted, this report grants what the Spanish Government denies them: the truth of their case. Schengen will survive if — and only if — its external borders are real, and the way to keep them real is for non-compliance to carry consequences. To the European Commission is left, in writing, the diagnosis of its supervening irrelevance: an institution that moves in five days from the unacceptable to congratulation does not protect the common space; it shrouds it in communiqués. To Morocco, the demand that no Spanish ministerial flattery should any longer conceal: explanations, verifiable prevention, and an end to the supremely comfortable doctrine according to which everything that happens north of its border is everyone’s fault but its own. And to the Government of Spain, the only thing it is still useful to demand of it: that it install the barriers the Supreme Court described; that it count its dead in one single manner and with head bowed; that it restore her post to the woman who told the truth and that whoever concealed it assume responsibility; and that it understand, however late, that the southern border is not an image problem: it is the condition of Spain’s existence as a serious State and of Europe’s as a free space.

For that, in the end, is the choice Ceuta has laid before the entire continent, and with it this report closes: Spain will be Europe’s frontier or it will be Europe’s breach. The dead of the breakwater, who can no longer choose, deserve that the living choose soon, and choose well.

NOTES AND SOURCES

1. National Security Department alert (31-VII-2026): more than 49,000 entries in 24 hours via the breakwater and Tarajal beach; Interior later raised the estimate to 50,000 (El Español, 31-VII). Subsequent press estimates: 60,000–72,000 for the episode as a whole (The Objective, 5-VIII; El Español, 1-VIII). Morocco officially acknowledged 40,000 entries (El Español, 3-VIII).

2. Historical series: some 20,000 accumulated irregular entries into Ceuta between 2017 and mid-2026, an average of a thousand a year (El Español, 1-VIII-2026).

3. Death toll: 72 per the Government Delegation (2-VIII, reported by CNN/AP); 88 per the Autonomous City; 79 bodies received at the Institute of Legal Medicine (Infobae, 5-VIII); around one hundred per the AUGC and Guardia Civil estimates reported by El Faro de Ceuta (The Objective, 3-VIII); 11 corpses on Moroccan shores (2-VIII).

4. Dismissal of the DSN communications chief: eldiario.es (3-VIII), El Español (3-VIII) and Moncloa.com (4-VIII). The alert was deleted within hours; the dismissal was communicated by telephone, for «loss of confidence»; it is the crisis’s only dismissal.

5. Royal Decree on extraordinary regularisation approved 14-IV-2026, in force 16-IV; window until 30-VI (Ministry of Inclusion; La Moncloa, 21-IV-2026).

6. Supreme Court, Contentious-Administrative Chamber, Fifth Section, judgment of 29-VI-2026; CGPJ note and analysis by El Independiente (30-VII-2026): doctrine on the Tenth Additional Provision of the Aliens Act and entries by swimming.

7. 1,174,978 applications registered at the close of the window, per the Ministry of Inclusion, Social Security and Migration (Maldita.es, 8-VII-2026).

8. Golden Owl report on the «kriaj assault» campaign (Le Grand Continent, 4-VIII-2026); International Security Observatory report — José María Gil Garre — on the campaign’s start before the ruling (The Objective, 5-VIII-2026); 11 million impressions and profiles in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, France and the US (Atalayar, 2-VIII-2026); precedent of the 2024 «TikTok avalanche»: 4,455 identified and six arrested at Fnideq.

9. Spanish intelligence warnings prior to the assault — buses at Castillejos, risk tied to the Feast of the Throne, request for early activation of the Army — systematically ignored (The Objective, 1-VIII-2026). The Government later maintained the CNI «did not alert» (eldiario.es, 3-VIII-2026).

10. Preceding week: ~1,500 entries in ten days, a hundred minors swimming in on one night, 99 rescued by Maritime Rescue and the Red Cross, the year’s thirtieth corpse on the Ceuta shoreline (Demócrata, late July 2026).

11. Request for a national emergency and single command by Juan Jesús Vivas and Government refusal; unanimous request by the Assembly of Ceuta — PSOE included — to declare the situation of interest for National Security, also rejected; Feijóo’s demand to activate Art. 23 of the National Security Act; Podemos’s demand for the national emergency and Grande-Marlaska’s resignation (Infobae and Público, 30-VII-2026).

12. Social-network call for a new mass assault on 15 August, with the digital structures intact (El Faro de Ceuta and El Español, via El Observador, 5-VIII-2026; The Objective, 5-VIII-2026).

13. The ruling states that «nothing would prevent» border rejection if physical containment elements were installed in the sea, and specifies that drones, thermal cameras and sensors are surveillance, not containment (El Economista, July 2026; El Derecho, August 2026).

14. Post-crisis government plan with physical containment barriers in the sea and application of rejection to those who surmount them (Maldita.es, 5-VIII-2026).

15. Interior Ministry note of 30-VII-2026 on trafficking networks «instrumentalising a judicial ruling»; clarifying note of 3-VIII-2026 on the ruling’s scope (Maldita.es, 5-VIII-2026).

16. Extraordinary regularisations in Spain: 1986, 1991 and 1996 (González governments), 2000 and 2001 (Aznar governments, ~500,000), 2005 (Zapatero government, 576,506) and 2026 (Maldita.es, with Ministry of Inclusion data).

17. «Processing of the 2026 Extraordinary Regularisation. Questions and answers», La Moncloa, 28-I-2026: denies the existence of a pull effect where a closed time frame is set.

18. Letter of 22 Member States, led by Italy and Denmark, to Costa, Von der Leyen and the Irish presidency (1/2-VIII-2026): links the crisis to the Supreme Court ruling and to the regularisation as a pull factor, and announces readiness to reinforce or reintroduce internal controls. France, Portugal, Ireland and Luxembourg did not sign.

19. On 30 July itself the Government wound up the national emergency declared over the Ávila and Madrid fires (Público, 30-VII-2026), disproving the instrument’s supposed non-existence.

20. Offer by Commissioner Magnus Brunner to Grande-Marlaska of the urgent deployment of the European Border and Coast Guard, with no Spanish request (El Español, 31-VII-2026); reiterated in writing by Von der Leyen (The Objective, 3-VIII-2026).

21. The Government’s delegate, Miguel Ángel Pérez, acknowledged not having the figure for unaccompanied minors (Infobae, 2-VIII-2026).

22. Appearances by Grande-Marlaska in Congress over the Koldo affair and his management of the Valencia floods (Infobae, archive 2025-2026).

23. Silence of the DSN’s public channels since 31-VII-2026, coinciding with the dismissal of its communications chief (El Español, 3-VIII-2026).

24. Forensic deployment: 9 forensic doctors and 6 autopsy technicians reinforced from Cáceres, Valladolid, Salamanca, Albacete and Toledo; the old Military Hospital fitted out as a morgue; the Area Prosecutor’s Office reinforced (Infobae, 5-VIII-2026).

25. Albares’s statements: «total and immediate» Moroccan collaboration, the Lampedusa comparison, the «reactionary international», the Spanishness of Ceuta and Melilla (Pressdigital and El Faro de Ceuta, 2/3-VIII-2026; El Español, 3-VIII-2026; Mundiario, 3-VIII-2026). JHA Council conclusions of 4-VIII: congratulations on the «swift and effective» response (The Objective, 4-VIII-2026).

26. Interior Ministry, 1-VIII-2026: 48,300 people returned or gone back to Morocco, fewer than 2,000 remaining in the city (El Español, 1-VIII-2026).

27. 528 unaccompanied minors identified by the Police and delivered into the Autonomous City’s guardianship, with 29 reception places (Infobae, 2 and 5-VIII-2026). 2021 precedent: judicial annulment of minors’ repatriations and Ombudsman proceedings (Contentious-Administrative Court No. 1 of Ceuta; Ombudsman, 2022).

28. Letter from Pedro Sánchez to the European institutions, 1-VIII-2026: some partners’ reaction «selfish, polarising and illegal» (EFE/Infobae, 1-VIII-2026).

29. Albares’s statements on the «reactionary international» and the summoning of the Italian ambassador, not the Moroccan ambassador (El Español, 31-VII and 3-VIII-2026).

30. Italian concretisation: random checks at ports and airports on non-EU travellers, affecting neither Spanish nor EU citizens; precedent of Italian controls with Slovenia (El Español, 31-VII-2026).

31. Finland (Minister Mari Rantanen): Spain’s complete failure to protect the external border; Denmark (Mette Frederiksen): consider all options, including suspending Schengen cooperation; France (Minister Laurent Nuñez): reinforced controls and activation of the Rapid Intervention Border Force; the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden and Belgium: demands for control and protection of the common border (El Español and Infobae, 31-VII-2026).

32. Conclusions of the extraordinary Council of Interior Ministers, 4-VIII-2026: solidarity with Spain, congratulations, situation under control, five lines of work (The Objective, 4-VIII-2026; eldiario.es, 4-VIII-2026).

33. Von der Leyen’s statements of 31-VII-2026: «unacceptable» images, demand for the immediate cessation of entries and swift returns (El Español, 31-VII-2026).

34. Von der Leyen’s letter to Sánchez of 3-VIII-2026: «efficient and effective» management by Spain and Morocco, reminder of the support offered «from the very first moment», five priority areas and a generic warning against the use of illegal immigration as an instrument of pressure (The Objective, 3-VIII-2026).

35. Two Moroccan military observation satellites positioned over the Strait during the assault (The Objective and El Español, 1/3-VIII-2026); dispatch of four military aircraft to Tetouan (The Objective, 5-VIII-2026); mass military ceremony presided over by Mohammed VI in Tetouan, 42 km from Ceuta (El Español, 1-VIII-2026).

36. Dissemination by the MAP agency of Felipe VI’s congratulations to Mohammed VI on the Feast of the Throne at the height of the crisis (ESdiario, 5-VIII-2026); digital manhunt with death threats and €30,000 bounties for identifying Ceuta residents (El Español and El Faro de Ceuta, via El Observador, 5-VIII-2026); collapse of the CETI with fights and encampments (El Español, 3-VIII-2026).

37. Identification in Ceuta of immigrants linked to jihadism previously expelled from Spain (El Español and El Faro de Ceuta, via El Observador, 5-VIII-2026).

38. Muslim demography of Ceuta: 35,561 Muslims as of 31-XII-2023, of whom 31,163 Spaniards and 4,938 foreigners (mainly Moroccans) — «Demographic study of the Muslim population», Andalusí Observatory/UCIDE (reported by Ceuta Actualidad, 6-X-2024); around 43% of the population per UCIDE itself (Ceuta Actualidad, 21-II-2019); a 40-45% range in the academic literature (Briones et al., «Musulmanes en Ceuta»).

39. A. Macarrón and J. Leguina, «Demography of the Canaries, Ceuta and Melilla: Spain’s porous southern border», CEU-CEFAS, 2026: a majority of Muslim origin among children and the young in Ceuta and Melilla; more than 80% of newborns with Muslim names; 11.8% of Ceuta’s population born in Morocco (The Objective, 24-VII-2026; Libertad Digital, 25-VII-2026).

40. Assembly of Ceuta election results 1995-2023: Central Electoral Board and Historia Electoral (historiaelectoral.com/aceuta.html); Vivas’s 2023 proclamation as head of the most-voted list under Art. 15 of the Statute of Autonomy. Ceuta’s seat in Congress won by Vox at the general elections of November 2019 and July 2023.

41. Official barometer on the Muslim community in Spain (Metroscopia for the Ministries of the Interior, Justice and Labour and Immigration, 2010): 89% consider it perfectly possible to be a good Muslim and a good Spaniard; a community described as tolerant, westernised and respectful of the institutions (Ministry of Inclusion, 7-IV-2010; El Faro de Ceuta, 2011).

42. «Political representation and local identity in Ceuta (1975-2023)», Revista de Estudios en Seguridad Internacional (2025): double Muslim-Ceutan identity, a demand for full recognition within Spain; it also documents local Vox leaders’ rhetoric on «ID-card Spaniards» and «re-Hispanicisation». CIS 2023 study on cultural, national and European identities.

43. After Portugal’s separation from the Hispanic Monarchy in 1640, the Ceutans chose to remain under Spanish sovereignty, a decision later recognised by the Spanish-Portuguese treaties (historical synthesis: Geografía Infinita, «Historia de la ciudad de Ceuta y sus comunidades»).

44. Clash within the Council of Ministers over the prior warnings: the Defence Minister defends the CNI while the Interior Minister insists there was no information; analysts rebut the official version, pointing to warnings from local and Moroccan sources (COPE, «Herrera en COPE», 6-VIII-2026).

Gustavo de Arístegui y San Román

Diplomat / Former Ambassador of Spain / Writer / Geopolitical Analyst