Photos by David Paul Appell unless otherwise noted

Both my husband and I have always had something of a fascination for oddities of geography, and so Spain´s two cities of Ceuta and Melilla, on the coast of North Africa, had been forever on my bucket list. Since moving to Spain, we ticked Melilla off that list three years ago, and this past spring we finally made it to sister city Ceuta for a two-night visit. Perched on a narrow peninsula where the Mediterranean Sea meets the Atlantic Ocean, this territory of just 18.5 square kilometers (seven sq. miles) and around 84,000 residents packs a surprising amount of history, architecture, and Spanish-Moroccan cultural fusion into a footprint smaller than some neighborhoods of larger cities.

And now of course Ceuta is all over the world headlines thanks to the overnight migration crisis manufactured by Morocco (with the apparent help of Israel, the United States, and possibly Russia), in which on July 30th Moroccan border guards let some 80,000 people – mostly young men – mostly swam into Ceuta spurred by social media lies that the border was “open.” Within a couple of days, 70,000 had voluntarily returned, but more than 100 died in the crossing, and Spain (and the rest of Europe) are still dealing with the aftermath – repercussions political as well as humanitarian (caring for thousands of remaining migrants, mostly from sub-Saharan countries and including more than a thousand children, who remain in Ceuta even as you read this.

Ceuta's story stretches back to the Carthaginians, who first settled the site more than two millennia ago. It later passed through the hands of the Romans (who  named their settlement Septum Fratres, "seven brothers," for the hills surrounding it, shortened to Septum and eventually evolving into Ceuta), followed by the Byzantines, Visigoths, and various Arab and Berber power