What Morocco Actually Claims — and What It Does Not

A story circulates in expatriate conversation and on social media. Morocco, it says, wants the Canary Islands next.

It is not true, and the accurate version is more useful. Morocco has never claimed the archipelago, and it once defended Spain's title to it.

What Morocco does dispute is the water. That dispute is real, it is unresolved, and Madrid has been conspicuously quiet about it.

The claim that was never made

The intellectual source of Moroccan irredentism is Allal el Fassi, the Istiqlal party leader. His "Greater Morocco" map was published in the newspaper Al-Alam on 7 July 1956.

It claimed Western Sahara, Mauritania, Algerian territories including Tindouf and Béchar, northern Mali, and Ceuta and Melilla. The Canary Islands were not on it.

The historical record goes further in the other direction. In the 1970s and 1980s, when Algeria and Libya were backing Antonio Cubillo's Canarian independence movement, Morocco supported Spanish sovereignty over the islands.

Morocco's live claims against Spain are Ceuta, Melilla and the small rocky possessions along the coast. These are restated regularly, including at the United Nations. The Canaries are not among them.

The dispute that is real

On 6 March 2020 King Mohammed VI signed laws 37-17 and 38-17. They were published in the official bulletin at the end of that month.

The laws set a twelve-mile territorial sea, a 200-mile exclusive economic zone and a continental shelf extendable to 350 miles. They apply along all Moroccan coasts, including those of Western Sahara.

At its narrowest the gap between Fuerteventura and the African coast is around 100 kilometres. A 200-mile Moroccan zone therefore overlaps the Canarian one by simple geometry.

In practice a median line runs between Gran Tarajal and Cabo Juby. Morocco has never recognised it in law.

Rabat's stated position is that the median line "only serves as a criterion between two continental shelves" and that equity should override its automatic application. Translated, that means islands should be given reduced effect against a continental coastline.

It is worth being precise about what this is and is not. The laws do not annex Canarian waters. They create a legal overlap that has to be negotiated, and Morocco has said it will not impose accomplished facts.

Thirty years without a line

Nine rounds of delimitation talks ran between 2003 and 2007 and produced nothing. A bilateral working group on maritime delimitation was created in April 2022, after Spain's shift on Western Sahara.

The thirteenth High-Level Meeting between the two governments was held in Madrid on 4 December 2025. Its joint declaration ran to 23 pages and 119 points.

Maritime delimitation was not among them. Neither was Western Sahara airspace.

Canarian president Fernando Clavijo called the omission, and the absence of any Canarian representation at the meeting, unacceptable. Spain's own claim to some 296,000 square kilometres of extended continental shelf west of the islands has been sitting with a United Nations commission since 2014, blocked in practice by the overlap.

Monte Tropic, and why it is oversold

Much of the anxiety attaches to one underwater mountain. Monte Tropic is an extinct seamount roughly 500 kilometres, or 270 nautical miles, south-southwest of El Hierro.

Its summit lies about 1,000 metres below the surface. Its ferromanganese crusts contain tellurium and cobalt, and a 2017 British survey estimated some 2,670 tonnes of tellurium.

Three qualifications matter. The seamount lies outside both the Spanish and the Moroccan 200-mile zones, in what is currently international seabed.

The figures circulating are theoretical resource estimates, not recoverable reserves. And the deposits sit below 3,000 metres, with commercial extraction estimated at twenty to thirty years away and a growing international push for a deep-sea mining moratorium.

Tropic is a long-term strategic question. It is not a prize about to be taken.

The Pegasus story does not work

A widely repeated claim holds that Morocco hacked Pedro Sánchez's phone and used the material to force Spain's reversal on Western Sahara. The dates do not support it.

The infections did precede the letter by ten months. But the Spanish government did not know about them until six weeks after the letter was written.

The audit that found them happened only because a separate scandal in April 2022 forced a sweep of government devices. Officials conceded the breach would probably never have been discovered otherwise.

A government cannot be blackmailed with an intrusion it does not know exists. The theory requires an additional step, that Morocco privately used the extracted material as leverage, for which no public evidence has been produced.

Attribution has never been established either. In March 2023 the Spanish government explicitly disassociated Morocco from the case, and a Spanish fact-checking outlet rated the political version of the claim false as recently as 4 September 2026.

The genuinely under-reported fact needs no conspiracy. Sánchez changed a decades-old Spanish position by letter, it was made public by the Moroccan royal palace before Madrid released it, there was no authorising vote, and in April 2022 the Spanish Congress passed a motion rebuking the shift with the support of one of the government's own coalition partners.

Ceuta in July, and what the leaked report says

The mass movement on Ceuta happened over roughly 48 hours on 30 and 31 July 2026. Estimates put the numbers at between 60,000 and 80,000 people, against a city population of about 84,000.

More than 70,000 returned to Morocco within hours. The trigger was a distorted reading of a Spanish Supreme Court ruling of 8 July, circulated on social media as "Spain has opened its borders".

The death toll is disputed and should be given as a range. Spain confirmed 79 dead at sea by 4 August; the NGO Caminando Fronteras counted 141; Morocco has acknowledged 11.

In early September a 55-page report by CENIF, the intelligence unit of Spain's national police immigration directorate, was leaked. It alleges active guidance by Moroccan gendarmes toward specific crossing points, prior planning, and internal alerts dated 28 and 29 July predicting a coordinated entry.

Spain's own Interior Ministry then distanced itself from it. The director of the national police said the reports do not allow the involvement of any government to be established, and a senior commissioner said the intellectual authorship remains unknown.

There is also a serious counter-argument. The sociologist Mehdi Alioua has pointed out that 30 July is Throne Day and 31 July was the Bay'a ceremony, that no state sabotages its own national holiday, and that summer coastal concentration plus mass youth unemployment made a bottleneck likely without anyone planning it.

It is often said that 22 European Union states signed a declaration against Spain over Ceuta. That is a misreading of a real document. The letter was driven by Italy and signed by 22 member states; Spain, France, Portugal, Ireland and Luxembourg did not sign.

Its content expressed support for Spain's handling of the crisis while arguing that the episode exposed failures in the European system. It called for deeper cooperation with Morocco, stronger Frontex deployment and faster returns, and warned against pull factors such as mass regularisation. That last point is an implicit criticism of Spanish domestic policy. It is not a declaration against Spain.

What the numbers say about the islands

The Atlantic route to the Canaries is shrinking fast. Interior Ministry figures for 1 January to 15 August show 4,808 arrivals on 64 boats in 2026, down 59.5 percent on the same period of 2025.

The comparison with the peak is starker. The full year 2024 brought 46,843 arrivals.

Two things complicate the good news. The first is that pressure has moved rather than disappeared: over the same period land arrivals at Ceuta rose 191 percent and at Melilla 230 percent.

The second is lethality. Caminando Fronteras recorded 1,906 deaths on the Atlantic route in 2025 and 635 in the first five months of 2026, a slower fall than the fall in arrivals, which means the crossing has become more dangerous per person attempting it.

What Madrid and the islands have actually said

The 2026 National Security Report identifies growing vulnerability along the Canaries–Atlantic arc and the Strait. It frames this as trafficking and organised crime rather than state pressure, and notes confirmed clandestine drone flights between Morocco and Spain.

The Canarian government's position is more layered than the polemics suggest. In April 2026 Clavijo hosted the president of Morocco's Souss-Massa region in Las Palmas and said he shares and accepts Spain's position that autonomy under Moroccan sovereignty is one of the most realistic solutions.

He was blunter about Ceuta. On 31 August he said the central government had been "quite incapable" and had not risen to the occasion, and warned that the archipelago faces renewed pressure if Morocco relaxes its coastal controls.

Both things are true at once. The Canarian government is pursuing ports, tourism and blue-economy cooperation with Morocco while warning that it has no say in the maritime question that most affects it.

A footnote on gas. The Maghreb-Europe pipeline has carried no Algerian gas since the transit contract lapsed on 31 October 2021, and Algeria has repeatedly refused to reopen it. Since June 2022 Spain has run the pipeline in reverse, sending regasified liquefied natural gas to Morocco, so Spanish infrastructure now supplies the country the closure was aimed at.

Algeria never cut Spain off, and remains its largest supplier at 34.8 percent of imports between January and July 2026. The surprising figure is Russian liquefied gas at 18.3 percent. Prices are rising again: the Spanish gas market averaged 61.87 euros per megawatt hour in August 2026, up almost 90 percent year on year, though still far below the 2022 peak.