Río de Oro

Río de Oro was the southern and larger part of Spain's Saharan territory on the Atlantic coast of north-west Africa, covering roughly two-thirds of what is now Western Sahara. Spain claimed it in 1884, but for half a century its presence amounted to little more than a fortified post at Villa Cisneros, today Dakhla, while the Sahrawi nomads of the interior lived largely beyond its reach. In 1958 it was merged with Saguia el-Hamra to the north to form the province of Spanish Sahara.

The name, "River of Gold", goes back to 1436, when the Portuguese navigator Afonso Gonçalves Baldaia, sent south by Prince Henry the Navigator, sailed into the long bay behind the Dakhla peninsula and took it for the mouth of a great river. No gold was found there, though some gold dust was obtained by trade, but the name stuck to the bay and the land around it. From the eighteenth century, fishermen from the Canary Islands worked the rich waters offshore.

In the 1880s Spanish Africanist societies, backed by business interests hoping to tap fishing and the trans-Saharan caravan trade, pressed the government to act before France or Britain did. On 28 November 1884 the envoy Emilio Bonelli signed a treaty with representatives of the Oulad Bou Sbaa allowing trading posts on the coast, and Spain declared a protectorate in December 1884, a claim recognised at the Berlin Conference. A fort begun in 1885 was abandoned after an attack by the Oulad Delim, then reoccupied by troops and named Villa Cisneros. The Oulad Delim attacked again in 1887, 1892 and 1894, until an agreement with one of their leaders in 1895.

Treaties with France in 1900, 1904 and 1912 fixed the frontiers with French territory in what became Mauritania and with the French protectorate in Morocco, cutting back wider Spanish ambitions. Inside these lines Spain did little. Resistance to European advance in the western Sahara centred on the Sahrawi religious leader Ma al-Aynayn, who founded the town of Smara in 1898 and urged the tribes to oppose the French and Spanish; his sons continued the struggle against France for years. Fighters often used Spanish-claimed territory as a base, largely unhindered. A single-ship naval action, the Battle of Río de Oro, was fought off the coast in August 1914 between a British cruiser and a German auxiliary cruiser.

Governor Francisco Bens added small coastal posts at Tarfaya in 1916 and La Güera in 1920, and an aerodrome was later built at Tarfaya. Only in 1934 did Spanish-led Saharan auxiliaries occupy the interior, reaching Smara in May; by the end of that year Spain controlled the territory in practice. Sahrawi society, organised around nomadic herding, tribal assemblies called djemaa and Islamic and customary law, changed slowly. Spanish settlers never numbered more than about 15,000 in the whole Saharan territory, and fishing, the army and the administration were the main employers.

In the late 1940s the Saharan lands were joined with Ifni and Cape Juby as Spanish West Africa, and in 1958 Río de Oro and Saguia el-Hamra became the province of Spanish Sahara. Sahrawi nationalism grew from the late 1960s: Spain suppressed the Zemla Intifada in 1970, and the Polisario Front was founded in 1973. Under the Madrid Accords of 1975, Spain withdrew, and Río de Oro was split between Morocco in the north and Mauritania in the south. Mauritania gave up its share in 1979 after war with Polisario. The region remains part of the disputed territory of Western Sahara, divided by a Moroccan-built berm, with a ceasefire in place since 1991.

Our 1914, 1920, 1930 and 1938 maps label the territory Rio De Oro, south of Morocco and bordered inland by French West Africa. It was one of the African possessions of the Spanish Empire.