Ceuta, population 83,000, suffered what is being described as its worst night of vandalism last night since some 70,000 migrants poured across the Moroccan border at the end of July. Vehicles and rubbish containers were set alight in several districts, fires were started among belongings in migrant encampments and police intervened in several fights between migrants.
Madrid puts the number remaining in its North African exclave at around 5,000. But current estimates in Ceuta suggest it is almost double.
Night after night, Spanish television shows disturbing scenes from Ceuta
Nearly 13,000 pupils are due to return to school today under an extraordinary security operation. The Education Ministry has arranged private guards inside and outside schools around the clock, while the National Police, Guardia Civil, local police and armed forces have been brought into the operation to protect school routes. Some municipal nurseries have postponed reopening until later in September.
El País reports that one mother had to buy pepper spray on the mainland because it had sold out in Ceuta. Her daughter used to walk to school alone. “That’s no longer possible,” she says.
Migrants have been found inside schools at night. At a special-needs school, they were twice discovered in the music room, on one occasion with the air-conditioning running and YouTube playing on the interactive whiteboards. At another nursery, migrants were found sleeping inside.
Children’s playgrounds have also become contested territory. Residents of one neighborhood complain that migrants occupy their playground and sports pitch from morning until late at night. “Where do our children play?” asked one mother.
Health workers have changed their routines too. Seven nurses now have private security guards accompanying them on home visits. According to the nurses’ union SATSE, two others abandoned a visit after being approached by men brandishing belts.
El País found more than 250 migrant women and children living in tents without running water or showers and with just three portable urinals. Three lavatories supplied by the council had not been connected to the sewer system and were instead being used to anchor washing lines. “We’re abandoned, sick of promises,” said the local residents’ association president. Women unable to find space inside were sleeping on cardboard on the pavement.
Outside another reception center, hundreds wait in the hope that somebody inside will leave and free a place. Those admitted wear color-coded wristbands and, if they have no papers, are identified by numbers written on them in permanent marker. Police guarding the road have taken to wearing masks because of the smell.
El Faro de Ceuta reported at the weekend that military engineers clearing an encampment were threatened with knives and 40 or 50 people showered soldiers with stones. Riot-control officers intervened. Ceuta’s prison population has risen from its usual 280–300 to more than 400.
Meanwhile, the argument over how the crisis began has taken a dramatic turn.
Just four days after Spain’s prime minister Pedro Sánchez told Congress there was no solid evidence that Morocco orchestrated the crossing, a National Court judge has opened a criminal investigation citing evidence of active facilitation from Moroccan territory, although she has not attributed the ultimate order to the Moroccan government itself.
The distinction has made little impression on the Spanish public. A new poll for El País and Cadena SER finds that almost 90 percent of Spaniards attribute substantial responsibility for the crisis to Morocco. The interviews were conducted before the police report became public.
More ominously for Sánchez, who likes to argue that immigration is good for Spain, the crisis appears to have accelerated a hardening of attitudes that was already under way. Now nearly 54 percent regard immigration as broadly bad for Spain, compared with a third who regard it positively.
There has been a striking political shift too. In a 2024 survey, Sánchez’s left-wing PSOE was the party most trusted to manage immigration, ahead of the right-wing Vox and the Partido Popular. Asked the same question now, 27 percent choose Vox, which takes the most hardline stance, against 18 percent for Sánchez’s Socialists and 14 percent for the center-right Partido Popular.
Polls suggest that the Partido Popular with 32.4 percent of the vote will need the support of Vox (17.8 percent) to govern after the next general election (due by August next year). The Partido Popular and Vox already govern together in several regions.
Night after night, Spanish television shows disturbing scenes from Ceuta. Perhaps unsurprisingly, moving the migrants to the mainland is proving politically difficult. Nor, of course, have Spain’s EU partners been queuing up to welcome them. Meanwhile, Spanish voters are drawing their own conclusions.
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