Melilla la Vieja

Overview

Melilla la Vieja is the walled old town of Melilla, the Spanish city on the North African coast, built on a rock that pushes into the Mediterranean and is joined to the mainland by an isthmus. Work began in the 15th century over the ruins of Rusadir, the Phoenician and later Roman settlement on the same rock, and carried on through the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries until the fortress had four separate walled enclosures divided by moats and rock cuttings.

Melillans call it El Pueblo, the village. Newer signage calls it La Ciudadela. Whatever you call it, this is a working piece of town rather than a fenced monument: people live behind the walls, the streets have no gate and no ticket, and you can walk in at three in the morning if you feel like it. The museums and the underground spaces inside are the parts that keep hours.

The reason to spend half a day here is the density. Three of the four enclosures sit on the sea rock and one sits on the mainland, so in about a kilometre of walking you pass Renaissance curtain walls, an underground water cistern sealed in 1571, a Gothic chapel, a bomb-proof 18th-century lunette and a lighthouse from 1918, with the Mediterranean on one side and the Rif on the other.

Melilla itself is a Spanish autonomous city, a status it received when its Statute of Autonomy passed in 1995, and it sits on the Morocco border next to the port town of Beni Ansar. That geography is the whole point of the fortress, and it is still legible from the ramparts.

History

Pedro de Estopiñán took Melilla for the Catholic Monarchs on 17 September 1497, backed by the Duke of Medina Sidonia, and met almost no resistance: the rock sat on the frontier between the Kingdom of Tlemcen and the Kingdom of Fez and had been fought over and abandoned repeatedly. Ancient Rusadir had already been destroyed and rebuilt several times under Vandal and Arab invasions and Berber infighting, so what the Spanish inherited was a ruin on a good rock.

From the 15th century Melilla worked as one of the forward positions of the maritime frontier the Spanish crown built across the Mediterranean, and the four defensive enclosures went up over the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. Each generation of engineers worked outwards from the last, which is why the enclosures get newer as you move away from the sea.

The dated pieces let you follow the sequence without a plan. The Aljibes de las Peñuelas carry an inscription recording that the cisterns were closed on 1 February 1571 under Francisco Sánchez de Córdoba, then governor and captain of the city for the crown, and the stonemasons’ marks are still cut into the facade. Miguel de Perea built the Capilla de Santiago in 1551 with the master builder Sancho de Escalante; Pedro de Palacios rebuilt it in 1654.

The Iglesia de la Purísima Concepción was begun in 1657 and took roughly twenty five years, with its altars and altarpieces put up through the 18th century; until 1797 it doubled as the city’s only cemetery, and its crypts hold the remains of earlier inhabitants of the garrison.

The Fuerte de Victoria Grande, built between 1735 and 1736 as a triangular outwork with bomb-proof vaults under the governor Antonio de Villalba y Angulo, took the main weight of that siege. Work on the Hospital del Rey ran from 1758 to 1775, straight through it, and the building served as the city’s hospital until 1929.

The next big change came from outside the walls. From 1881 Melilla started building a ring of exterior forts to cover the city’s new limits, an innovative defensive system for its date, and those forts are sometimes counted as a fifth enclosure.

Protection arrived slowly. Serious work on the architectural value of the enclosures started in the Marina area in 1917 and picked up between 1927 and 1930. Melilla la Vieja was declared a Historic-Artistic Monument on 11 August 1953, the protected historic ensemble was widened in 1986 with Bien de Interés Cultural status, and a special rehabilitation plan for the four enclosures was finally approved on 2 April 1992. Most of what is open to visitors today dates from that last round of restoration.

Visiting

Nothing here is ticketed. The streets, walls, plazas and viewpoints of Melilla la Vieja are open access at any hour, and every museum and museum space inside is free. Everything indoors closes on Mondays and splits into winter and summer timetables, with a long afternoon gap in both.

The lift is the easy way up. It runs inside the Torreón de las Cabras, from Calle Cuesta de la Florentina, and operates Monday to Sunday from 07:45 to 23:00, which is far longer than anything it serves.

The route through the enclosures

The signed walking route runs backwards through time: you come in through the Fourth Enclosure, the newest, and finish in the First, the oldest. From the Plaza de las Culturas you climb the Alcazaba road for the view over the Frente de la Tierra and part of the Ensenada de los Galápagos, then come back down past the balustraded front of the Third Enclosure above the Foso de los Carneros, where the Torre de la Alafia, the barracks and the Baluarte de San Fernando stand. The Túnel de San Fernando gets you through to the Foso del Hornabeque; the Túnel de la Victoria and the Baluartes de San Pedro and San José bring you into the Second Enclosure, the Plaza de Armas.

What is open inside

The Centro de Interpretación de Melilla la Vieja, in the Torreón de las Cabras, is the sensible first stop because it explains how the walls were built and how they changed. It works on two levels, the upper reached from the Cuesta de la Florentina inside the walls, the lower at the lift landing, and a wall found in the rubble of the embankment comes up through the floor slab in the middle of the room. Winter hours are Tuesday to Saturday 10:00 to 14:00 and 16:00 to 20:00, Sundays 10:30 to 14:00; in summer the afternoon shifts to 17:00 to 21:00.

The Aljibes de las Peñuelas face the Plaza de la Maestranza and have four doors: the two central ones open into tanks holding more than 500 cubic metres each, the two side ones into the settling chambers where rainwater was filtered through sand and gravel. Winter hours are Tuesday to Saturday 10:00 to 13:30 and 16:00 to 20:30, Sundays 10:00 to 14:00, closed Mondays.

The Cuevas del Conventico, on Calle Iglesia, run on timed entries rather than free flow. Three levels: an irregular gallery with windows out over the cliff at the entrance, a middle level that was the church ossuary and now leads out to the Cala de Trápana, and a lower level laid out on a papal cross plan with a wide nave crossed by three others. Winter passes leave at 10:45, 11:45 and 12:45 in the morning and 16:45, 17:45 and 18:45 in the afternoon. The Colección de Arte Sacro shares the same address and the same timetable.

The Museo de Historia, Arqueología y Etnología sits in the Almacenes de las Peñuelas on the Plaza de la Maestranza, built in 1781 under Carlos III and the governor Antonio Manso and converted into museum space in 2007. There is also a military museum inside the walls. The Hospital del Rey, on the Plaza de la Parada, is now the city’s General Archive and holds the Biblioteca Cándido Lobera, a library specialising in Melilla and North Africa, plus temporary exhibition rooms; it keeps office hours, Monday to Friday 09:00 to 14:00, closed at weekends and on public holidays, free.

Off the rock

The Fuerte de Victoria Grande, on Avenida Cándido Lobera, is the outlying piece worth the detour. Ten gun embrasures, each finishing in a brick arch, merlons capped with loopholed head covers for musketeers, and inside a set of bomb-proof vaults around a triangular courtyard, entered over a drawbridge. Winter hours are Tuesday to Saturday 10:00 to 14:00 and 16:00 to 20:00, Sundays 10:00 to 14:00, closed Mondays, with the underground galleries by prior appointment only.

The lighthouse stands at the eastern tip, built in 1918 on the Bonete tower where a small light had stood since 1854, 39 metres above the sea and still fitted with Chance Brothers optics from Britain. It has been open to the public by appointment since its centenary in 2018, and you can climb to the terrace.

Tips

• Everything inside the walls is free, museums included, so there is no ticket to buy and no queue to plan around. The only thing you need to get right is the timetable.

• Do not come on a Monday if you want to go indoors. Every museum space in the citadel closes that day, and the Hospital del Rey closes at weekends and on public holidays instead.

• Check whether you are on the winter or summer timetable before you plan an afternoon. The morning slot barely moves, but the reopening time shifts from 16:00 in winter to 17:00 in summer, and the closing time from 20:00 to 21:00.

• The Conventico Caves are the one thing that can be missed by turning up at the wrong minute. Winter passes go at 10:45, 11:45 and 12:45, then 16:45, 17:45 and 18:45; in summer the afternoon passes run at 18:15, 19:15 and 20:00. Get there before the pass, not on it.

• Use the lift at the Torreón de las Cabras rather than the ramps if the heat or the gradient is a problem. It runs 07:45 to 23:00 daily, so it is also the way back down after the museums have shut.

• Book the underground galleries in advance, not on the day. The galleries under the Fuerte de Victoria Grande are visited by prior appointment only, and guided tours of the other spaces are arranged by phone or email through the Fundación.

• Allow two and a half hours if you take the guided walk. That is the Fundación’s own figure for a full circuit of Melilla la Vieja, and it is a fair estimate for doing it yourself with three or four indoor stops.

• Groups are handled in two different places. Schools and official bodies write to the Fundación directly; other groups go through the Oficina de Turismo on the Plaza de las Culturas.

• Do not plan a visit around the Iglesia de la Purísima Concepción. It has been closed for restoration since the January 2016 earthquake.

• Wear shoes with grip. The route runs through moats, ramps and two tunnels between enclosures rather than along level pavement, and the surfaces are original stone.