Marrakech – The government of Ceuta will rescind the contracts of residents awarded public housing if it confirms they are subletting those homes as flophouses for migrants who crossed from Morocco during last month’s mass entry into the Spanish-held enclave.
Local government spokesman Alejandro Ramírez confirmed the measure on Tuesday, telling reporters that the city has evidence of migrants in an irregular situation occupying publicly owned homes. Some of the cases, he explained, were reported directly by residents.
The concerns surfaced in Loma Colmenar, where residents alerted the local government to homes occupied by people with no right to be there.
According to Ramírez, the issue came up during a meeting called to discuss using a holding parcel in the district as a reception point for migrants. Residents used the encounter to raise the state of several public homes nearby. “We have knowledge because it was passed on directly by the neighbors,” he noted, adding that some told him “there were people inside.”
The situation dates to late July, after thousands of migrants entered the enclave through the Tarajal breakwater. The city’s housing department has begun reviewing each reported case, consulting the municipal housing company, Emvicesa, on what its rules allow.
Ramírez laid out the consequences plainly. Where phantom rentals are proven, the city will move to eviction “without leniency,” applying the “unilateral rescission” of the lease and the “eviction procedure” that follows. Sanctioning measures will be added where warranted.
“Anyone who has committed this irregularity will be both sanctioned and have their contract terminated,” he made clear, in a message he confirmed the city’s legal services had backed. Those services established that the leases themselves permit termination when such breaches occur.
The review covers two situations: homes occupied illegally, and homes whose awardees ceded them to third parties in breach of contract. Ramírez also pointed to illegal rentals of garages that belong not to private owners but to public developments run by the so-called “autonomous city.” He limited his remarks to council housing, noting separate cases in the Recinto zone and on Calle Tetuán.
Earlier this week, El Faro de Ceuta reported that residents of Canalejas and around the Recinto had warned of flophouse apartments renting for as much as €2,400 – about $2,650 – a month, alongside the regular presence of adolescents on the streets.
Ceuta sits on the North African coast, a Spanish-administered enclave lodged inside Moroccan territory. Morocco has claimed it, together with Melilla, since regaining independence in 1956, and treats both as colonial enclaves – the last European-held footholds on the African mainland.
Both enclaves were enlarged at Morocco’s expense. Ceuta’s boundaries, for instance, were widened under the Treaty of Wad-Ras, imposed by Spain after the War of Tetouan. For much of the modern era, Spain itself classified the possessions as presidios – fortified garrison outposts rather than ordinary cities.
Rabat calls them Sebta and Melilla and regards them as occupied land – vestiges of a colonial era that never fully closed, an anomaly it has never tolerated, and unfinished business it has never accepted as settled. From the Moroccan vantage point, the recurring emergencies along this coast trace back to that anomaly: a foreign-controlled entry point planted on Moroccan soil.
