The Town Spain Gave Back

Spain returned Sidi Ifni to Morocco in 1969. The Art Deco cinema and the Spanish consulate are still there. The Spanish are not.

Sidi Ifni was the capital of the Spanish territory of Ifni — a small enclave on the Atlantic coast of southern Morocco that Spain held from 1934 to 1969. The Spanish built the town in the 1930s and '40s in the colonial Art Deco style: curved facades, decorative balconies, a central plaza with a church, a consulate, an airstrip, and a cinema. The town was designed for a few thousand Spanish administrators and soldiers, with an Amazigh population surrounding it that had never asked for their presence.

In 1957, the Ifni War — a brief, largely forgotten conflict — saw Moroccan irregular forces besiege the enclave. The Spanish held the town but lost the surrounding territory. For the next twelve years, Sidi Ifni existed as a shrinking colonial anomaly — a pocket of Spain on the Moroccan coast, supplied by sea, serving no strategic purpose. In 1969, Spain ceded it to Morocco.

The handover was quiet. The Spanish packed and left. The Moroccans moved in. The Art Deco buildings stayed.

Today Sidi Ifni is a sleepy fishing town with a faded colonial centre. The cinema no longer shows films. The consulate is closed. The church has been repurposed. The central plaza — once the Plaza de España — still has the same layout but different flags. The Spanish balconies overlook Moroccan street life.

Surfers have discovered the coast south of town, where consistent swells hit the reef breaks. A few guesthouses have opened. But Sidi Ifni remains a place you arrive at rather than pass through — it is not on the way to anywhere. It is the end of a road, facing the ocean, wearing the architecture of a country that left more than fifty years ago.