Santa Cruz de la Mar Pequeña

Santa Cruz de la Mar Pequeña (literally Holy Cross of the Little Sea) was a Spanish settlement on the south-western coast of Morocco, across from the Canary Islands, founded in 1478 as a trading post with a fortress. It was located close to a lagoon (hence its name) not far off Cape Juby.^[1]

The importance of the settlement was derived from its position in the trans-Saharan slave trade, and captives were shipped to sugar plantations on the Canary Islands.

The Spanish were expelled from the area in 1524 by the Saadi dynasty. After its abandonment, the exact location of Santa Cruz de la Mar Pequeña was forgotten, to the point that when, in 1916, the Spanish gained control of the Cape Juby Strip, which included the location, they assigned it a new name, Puerto Cansado. The place is presently named Foum Agoutir and is near to Tarfaya.

On the other hand, in the mid-nineteenth century, during the Scramble for Africa, France and Spain laid conflicting claims over the Maghreb, and Spain became interested in its lost medieval fortress. The Sultanate of Morocco agreed to handle the place (of uncertain location) to Spain in the 1860 Treaty of Wad Ras, which had resolved the Spanish-Moroccan War. In the wake of the visit of a Spanish delegation to Fez in 1877, a joint Hispano-Moroccan committee was created in order to determine the location of Santa Cruz de la Mar Pequeña.^[2] This committee eventually misidentified Santa Cruz de la Mar Pequeña with Ifni,^[2] actually located about 480 kilometers north of the real fortress. The Moroccan sultan accepted the identification in 1883, even if the border delimitation did not take place at the time and the effective Spanish occupation had to wait until 1934.^[2]

See also[]

• Sidi Ifni
• Ifni

References[]

External links[]

• (in Spanish) En busca de la torre perdida

Coordinates: 28°3′N 12°13′W / 28.050°N 12.217°W / 28.050; -12.217