Before the mass influx of migrants that hit Ceuta this summer, before images of thousands of people became a daily feature in the Spanish media, the city was already facing another crisis, one that had no direct connection to migrants. It was an economic and demographic crisis that had developed gradually, with an important part of it linked to the changing nature of the city’s commercial relationship with Morocco.
Figures from Spain’s National Statistics Institute provide a clear starting point. In 2021, 2,497 Spanish citizens moved from Ceuta to other parts of Spain, followed by 2,408 in 2022, 2,299 in 2023 and 2,019 in 2024 — a total of 9,223 recorded residential movements out of the city over four years. These figures do not mean that 9,223 different people permanently left Ceuta, since the statistics record movements rather than unique individuals. But they do show clearly that the departure of Spanish citizens was already a reality years before the latest migration events.
At the same time, Ceuta received Spanish citizens arriving from other parts of the country, but the balance remained negative. The city recorded a net loss of 943 people in 2021, 543 in 2022, 424 in 2023 and 307 in 2024. For a small city, figures of this kind cannot simply be ignored, particularly when they concern its Spanish population.
But why was Ceuta losing part of that population?
It is difficult to separate this development from the transformation of the city’s economy after Morocco tightened controls along the border and progressively brought an end to the informal trade that had linked Ceuta to the Moroccan market. For decades, the city had benefited from its border position and from the movement of goods towards northern Morocco. That activity formed an important part of the direct and indirect economy on both sides of the border. From Morocco’s perspective, however, maintaining such a system indefinitely was no longer acceptable, particularly because part of those exchanges was regarded as damaging to the national economy and the domestic market.
As Morocco gradually closed that channel, it was not only Fnideq and the surrounding areas that were affected. Ceuta also lost part of the economic function that had made its border position a constant source of activity. The closure of the border during the Covid-19 pandemic deepened the rupture. Morocco subsequently continued reorganising the movement of people and goods across the border.
The consequences were bound to appear in cities that had depended on that movement for years.
It therefore becomes difficult to blame the migrants who arrived this summer for a phenomenon that had begun several years before they appeared. The Spanish demographic chronology leaves little room for such a confusion of timelines. The departure of Spanish citizens was already being recorded in 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024, while the latest migration wave came much later.
Then came the events.
Suddenly, Ceuta was confronted with very large numbers of new arrivals, scenes on beaches and streets and around reception facilities, a heightened security and political response, and the return of the city to the centre of Spain’s national debate. A problem that had been partly economic and demographic was transformed into a migration, security and border crisis.
That is where the question worth investigating begins, rather than a question that can simply be answered in advance: did migration create Ceuta’s crisis, or did it arrive to magnify a crisis that already existed?
The first explanation presented in Spanish political and media discourse naturally focuses on migration. But the chronology offers a more complicated picture. Before this, the city had already been losing one of its main sources of economic activity while simultaneously recording a continuing departure of Spanish citizens towards the rest of the country.
Then comes the most sensitive question: who was behind the latest mass migration wave?
That question cannot be settled in a journalistic article through suspicion alone, or simply by referring to the events of 2021. In May of that year, thousands of people entered Ceuta within a few days amid a serious political and diplomatic crisis between Morocco and Spain. At the time, accusations were made on both sides concerning the management of the border and the use of migration as a means of political pressure. But the existence of a precedent does not, by itself, prove that the events of 2026 followed the same pattern.
To claim that Spanish security services or the government of Ceuta manufactured the attack would therefore require documents, investigations and direct testimony. Another question, however, can be examined more concretely: how did Spain, and the government of Ceuta in particular, make use of the crisis once it had begun?
The crisis gives the city a degree of importance that its economy alone could no longer provide. Security becomes a priority, the border becomes a national issue, migration becomes a permanent matter for Madrid, and the need for additional resources and funding becomes more pressing. A city already facing economic transformation and demographic decline suddenly finds itself at the centre of one of the most sensitive issues for the Spanish state.
That is why it is necessary to go back to the beginning rather than focus only on the latest images.
When Morocco gradually ended a trade system that was weighing on its economy, it had no obligation to preserve the economic model of a city under Spanish occupation. The consequences for the other side of the border were foreseeable. Ceuta had benefited from the Moroccan market, and once the rules changed, the city had to look for another economic model.
Migration did not create this problem.
And even if future investigations were to establish that a particular party had played a role in creating or directing the migration wave, that would not change one essential fact: Ceuta was already facing its economic and demographic problem before that wave arrived.
That is why the figure that should not disappear behind all the images is not only the number of migrants who entered the city this summer, but also the number of Spanish citizens who had chosen to leave it during the preceding years.
More than nine thousand recorded movements from Ceuta to the rest of Spain between 2021 and 2024, with lower flows in the opposite direction, in a city whose population numbers only a few tens of thousands.
What happened this summer has added another layer to the problem.
And anyone seeking to understand Ceuta’s future will not find the answer in the number of migrants alone, but in a simpler and, at the same time, more difficult question: what remains of the city after Morocco began closing the market on which it had depended for so long?
