Regions of Spain
Melilla: the Autonomous City
By m.p. - Nov 5, 2007 - 9:16 PM
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Situated on the shores of the Strait of Gibraltar at the top of the African continent, the Autonomous City of Melilla faces onto the Andalucía province of Málaga and was, until autonomy came in the mid 1990s, administered as part of Málaga.
It covers an area of 13 kilometres on the southeast coast of the Tres Forcas Peninsula, and, according to the latest census in January 2006, is home to 66,871 people comprising four separate cultures: Christians, Muslims, Sephardic Jews and a minority population of Hindus.
A former Phoenician trading post known as Rusadir, the city was also a strategic port in the wars between the Carthaginians and the Romans, and was part of the Kingdom of Fez when it was conquered for Spain by the Duke of Medina Sidonia in 1497.
The conquest followed the Catholic Kings, Ferdinand and Isabella’s, defeat of the Nasrid Kingdom of Granada in 1492, in what was the culmination of the ‘Reconquista,’ the Reconquest of Spain.
Melilla became the Autonomous City of Ceuta under its 1995 Statute of Autonomy, and the first elections to the city’s parliament, the Asamblea, were held that year, giving an absolute majority to the Partido Popular.
Mustafa Aberchan, became in 1999, the first Muslim President of a Spanish autonomy, but was ousted in 2002 when the PP-Unión del Pueblo Millense coalition presented a motion of censure against Aberchan’s GIL/CpM coalition government, and the Partido Popular’s Juan José Imbroda became President of the city.
Imbroda won the next election in 2003 by an absolute majority as the presidential candidate for PP- UPM, repeating his success for the Partido Popular four years later in 2007, but this time without the support of the party’s previous partner.
It was the first time in more than a decade that Melilla’s autonomous government was formed by just one party, without the need for any coalition or pact.
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