Day Trip to Spain

This weekend, Caleb, Luigi and I decided to take a trip to Melilla, Spain, which is just a train ride away from Rabat. For those who don’t know, Spain controls two cities in mainland Africa; Ceuta and Melilla. This, as I found out later, is a controversial issue for many Moroccans who believe the cities should be controlled by Morocco. For us, however, it was a nice excuse to go to Spain without paying for a flight.

We decided to take the night train from Rabat to Beni Nsar, the border town near Melilla. This was reasonably cheap, about $20CDN, but was the coldest I’ve ever been in my life. I was wearing two sweaters, two shirts, and my snapback (obvi) and was huddled up in a ball all night trying to sleep and not to freeze. I thought Morocco was supposed to be warm….

8 hours later, at about 630am, we arrived in probably the sketchiest town in Morocco, Beni Nsar. It’s a town which feels like it has no identity- as its economy is based on being the entrypoint to Spain. The town seems to have two purposes; firstly as a point to transfer goods from Europe to Morocco; and second as the final stop for many who attempt to illegally enter into Europe in search of a better life.

In order to cross the border, we had to fill out the usual Moroccan form including who we are, where we are from, and why we’re in Morocco. However, we filled them out in no man’s land between the two borders with guys who gave us the form in exchange for money. It was a sketchy process because they wanted us to give them our passports to fill the form, but we pressed them to give us the form to fill ourselves.

After filling the forms and paying a dirham to the form guy, we got to the agent at the border who, as usual, asked me where I was from because a brown man cannot possibly be Canadian…. Then they finally let us into Spain.

Getting into Spain was weird, because as soon as we walked out of the border crossing and looked around, it looked like a weird mix of Morocco and Spain. It was a large boulevard, which in the middle had beautiful trees and a massive Spanish flag, but was surrounded by small run down shops, reminiscent of Beni Nsar. This side of the border was also mostly Moroccan people, relative to downtown Melilla.

As we were walking into town, we realized we didn’t get our passports stamped on the way into Spain, effectively we had entered Spain illegally. Realizing what a pain it would be to get back without a stamp, we rushed back to the border and made it look like we had just crossed and got our stamps.

When we got into downtown Melilla, we were shocked by how beautiful it was. It looked like we were in mainland Spain, somewhere like Barcelona. I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves:

Melilla is also a city with beautiful greenery:

One of the best known sights of Melilla is the old fort, which we got to explore. It’s right on the water and still has many of the old canons on display. What I found especially cool is it’s also an area where people still live!

And, no trip to Melilla would be compete without some time by the Mediterranean:

Because of Melilla’s unique location, being Spanish in Africa, it had some super interesting graffiti:

After a very long day of touring the city, we decided to head back to Rabat that night. On the way back, Luigi wanted to buy ham, since you can’t buy it in Morocco. However, at the butcher near the border, we were told that you can only buy that in town because “around here, everything halal.” This was ironic because it was right next to a liquor store, and a bunch of people were openly drinking in the street……

After the same process of crossing the border, we stopped for a Moroccan dinner- brochettes, bread, soup, and sauces. We then boarded the night train and slept the whole way back to Rabat.

Even though we spent less than half the trip in Melilla itself, it was still such a change from Rabat- really broke the monotony of everyday life!