Spanish Sahara

Spanish Sahara was the Spanish colony, and later province, covering what is now Western Sahara on the Atlantic coast of north-west Africa. Spain claimed the coast in 1884 and ruled the territory until early 1976, first as the Spanish Possessions in the Sahara and from 1958 as the Province of the Sahara. It was one of the last pieces of the Spanish Empire, and its hurried end left a dispute that remains unresolved.

Canary Islands fishermen had worked the rich waters off this coast since the eighteenth century. In the late nineteenth century Spanish Africanist societies, backed by business interests and fearful of British or French moves, lobbied for a foothold. On 28 November 1884 the explorer Emilio Bonelli signed a treaty with representatives of the Oulad Bou Sbaa allowing trading posts, and in December Spain declared a protectorate over Río de Oro, Cape Blanc and Angra de Cintra. A fort at Río de Oro, attacked by the Oulad Delim in 1885, was reoccupied and named Villa Cisneros.

Treaties with France in 1900, 1904 and 1912 fixed the frontiers with French Mauritania and Morocco, cutting back Spain's wider claims. For decades Spanish presence remained confined to a handful of coastal posts. Inland, the Sahrawi religious leader Ma al-Aynayn, who founded the town of Smara in 1898 with help from the Moroccan sultan, rallied the desert tribes against colonial advance, and his sons carried on resistance, mainly against the French, often using Spanish territory as a base. Governor Francisco Bens occupied Tarfaya in 1916 and La Güera in 1920, but Madrid held back from deeper expansion.

Only in 1934 did Spain occupy the interior, reaching Smara in May that year. Life for most Sahrawis, nomadic herders with their own assemblies and Islamic and customary law, changed slowly. Spanish settlers never numbered more than about 15,000, and many were soldiers or legionaries. El Aaiún, now Laayoune, was founded in 1940 near a large source of groundwater and became the capital. From the late 1940s the Sahara was grouped with Ifni as Spanish West Africa.

After Morocco won independence in 1956, it claimed the territory as part of its historic lands, and the Moroccan Army of Liberation attacked Spanish posts during the Ifni War of 1957 and 1958. Spain held on with French help, ceded the Tarfaya strip to Morocco in 1958 and turned the Sahara into a province. A Sahrawi movement led by Muhammad Bassiri emerged in 1967, and Spanish forces suppressed the Zemla Intifada in 1970. The Polisario Front, founded in 1973, launched a guerrilla campaign and by early 1975 Spain had lost control of much of the interior.

In 1975 the International Court of Justice found ties of allegiance between the territory and Morocco, but no legal ties of sovereignty. Weeks later Morocco organised the Green March, in which about 350,000 Moroccans crossed into the territory. As Francisco Franco lay dying, Spain signed the Madrid Accords with Morocco and Mauritania in November 1975 and left on 27 February 1976.

Morocco and Mauritania moved in, while the Polisario Front proclaimed the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic and fought both. Mauritania withdrew its claim in 1979; fighting with Morocco continued until a United Nations ceasefire in 1991. The planned referendum on self-determination has never been held. The United Nations still lists Western Sahara as a non-self-governing territory, Morocco controls about two-thirds of it, and Spain is regarded by the United Nations and a 2014 Spanish court ruling as its legal administering power.

Our 1914, 1920, 1930 and 1938 maps draw Spanish Sahara on the Atlantic coast, bordered inland by French West Africa. Later maps show the same area as Western Sahara.