At five in the morning, the music is still playing on the Sfiha Beach (Alhucemas). Ossiano Beach closes at that time; Havana and Golden Beach, in August, never close. Just 700 meters away from rental sunbeds, loudspeakers at full volume, jet skis, and foreigners of many nationalities drinking mojitos, there is a Spanish military post. This is the Peñón de Alhucemas, a small islet with a perimeter of 480 meters where, in the past, the soldiers stationed there, known as seagulls, would line up in front of the command post’s telescope to watch the festivals and beach bars opposite.
Despite the decades of difference, the stories of veteran ex-military over 70 years old and the young soldiers who pass through there today share a common link: the experience on a small islet considered the last frontier of Europe. To this enclave is added another rock, that of Vélez de la Gomera, located opposite Badis, a small Moroccan coastal village of 103 inhabitants completely unaware of the music and beach bars of Alhucemas. In addition to the Perejil islet, without a permanent presence, and the Chafarinas Islands.
IN THE SPOTLIGHT
The focus returns to these rocks because of what happened this summer on that same coast, the arrival in Ceuta of nearly 80,000 people and the call on Moroccan social networks for a second attempt on August 15, a day on which the city woke up sealed off. Days before that second assault, the Moroccan Minister of Justice, Abdellatif Ouahbi, had declared on Saudi television Asharq News that his country continues to claim Ceuta and Melilla and maintains that claim “in the long term.” Alhucemas, Vélez de la Gomera, the Chafarinas Islands, and Perejil are the most forgotten but also coveted pieces of a board that Morocco claims for its Greater Morocco, the territorial expansion desired by Mohamed VI.
And it was just around this time, centuries ago, when the Spanish army took command of both places. The garrison of the Peñón de Vélez de la Gomera has been there continuously for 462 years, since September 6, 1564, when it was taken by Philip II. It was then an islet, which became connected to Morocco by a land tongue after an earthquake in the 20th century. The border is a rope and it is the oldest continuous Spanish possession in North Africa after Melilla, taken in 1497. Alhucemas has been Spanish since August 28, 1673, when it was taken during the reign of Charles II.
Where there are now beach clubs with afro house music and an “Ibizan atmosphere,” as celebrated by reviews from foreign tourists, there used to be the Mediterranée, a French holiday club opposite the nudist beach frequently mentioned in various forums of ex-military stationed in Alhucemas. And a memory still very alive in the mind of Juan José, a political prisoner who was there in ’73, and in all the cohorts that have passed through there during the 20th century. Ramón, an ex-military stationed there in 1972, recalls how the French women of the club “were smaller than ants, but some enjoyed more from imagination than from what was seen through the chief engineer’s telescope.”
FOOTBALL AND WHISKY
On the rock, the week was not marked by the calendar but by the ship. On Friday mornings, the troops would go down to the dock to unload what arrived from Melilla — supplies, mail, the package of cold cuts that was then distributed at the tables, letters from the wives and children of the soldiers — and as soon as the last box touched the ground, the entire islet declared itself on free time until Monday. Then began the other side of the garrison, a barracks that became a playground: football matches, cards, a pack of cigarettes per table after lunch, whisky of the brand 100 Pipers, África beer, and improvised boxing matches in the dining room with the troops forming a circle.
Rafael, a Sevillian soldier stationed between late 1982 and early 1983 with the task of planning daily menus alongside the sergeant, nostalgically remembers a Moroccan neighbor from the area known among the troops as El Talet. He would approach in a small boat to exchange fresh vegetables for bottles of whisky.
Discipline, however, was an unbreakable rule that must not be broken under any circumstances. Josep Lluís, a sailor of the Marine Company who was there in 1972, recalls the drunkenness the entire troop got into to celebrate that a lieutenant’s wife had given birth to twins, an invitation from the officer himself that ended with consequences: “Who said that whisky drunkenness has no hangover? The next day we were arrested and made to run with the CETME [legendary Spanish assault rifle]. I thought the whole island was rumbling just like my head.”
Both rocks were barracks and prisons at the same time. They were the so-called “minor plazas,” where historically political prisoners, exiles, and common prisoners were sent from the Peninsula. According to historical accounts, they were the government’s preferred destination for the most troublesome criminals and, above all, for political prisoners sentenced to exile. There they worked forced labor in construction and performed other jobs: nurses, clerks, schoolteachers, and even officers’ servants.
There were more prisoners than civilians and soldiers combined. This context led to, on November 15, 1838, the Carlist lieutenant Pedro María Quintana, considered a great conspirator and who had been transferred to the rock for that reason, to revolt the troops and most of the confined and take over the military post of Alhucemas. What failed was the escape: they wanted to reach Castellón by sea to join Cabrera and ended up arrested by French authorities on the Algerian coast.
On May 6, 1907, both rocks ceased to be prisons and the prisoners were sent to the peninsula. Little trace remains of that. In Alhucemas today, among the lighthouse, the old hermitage that once housed the Virgin of the Rock, the governor’s house with its clock tower, and the alleys hidden among the stones, the old dungeons and underground galleries that can still be explored remain, as well as the cemetery of the adjacent islet known as La Pulpera, which is practically on the edge of the abyss.
Meanwhile, 700 meters from the Moroccan loudspeakers of Sfiha, the garrison of the Peñón de Alhucemas continues standing guard under the Spanish flag, just as those of Vélez de la Gomera and the Chafarinas Islands do.