History

The history of Ceuta is a celebration for the traveler through time and the senses.More than 300,000 years ago, the first human settlement in Benzú dates.To discover the cultural, historical and natural singularities of the City and its surroundings, you have to go to the sea. The navigations of the classic towns and their commercial routes; Phoenicians, Greeks, Carthaginians and Romans, always within the borders of Mare Nostrum, show the need to control the so-called Circle of the Strait, moved by commercial or geostrategic reasons as is the case of the installation of a dromones base by Justiniano I ( year 534 AD).Christianity and Islam always traded in our bay, with the immemorial presence of Hebrew communities in a Medina that came to have a considerable extension and importance in the context of the Islamic West.The arrival of Islam to Ceuta is later than that of the peninsula. It will remain under Muslim rule for seven centuries being conquered on the evening of August 21, 1415, when Juan Vaz de Almeda tremoló the Royal Banner and the flag of Lisbon in the Torre de Vela de Ceuta, 77 years before the Catholic Monarchs gave Concluded the Reconquest in Granada.Since then and for 2 and a quarter centuries Ceuta will live, speak, and feel in Portuguese. Until the Ceuta asked to join the Crown of Castile in 1640.With Felipe V will come the remodeling of the army, which will transform the formation of the State and will modify the traditional structure of the local economy.With the Bourbons reinforces the image of fortified square and military garrison of Ceuta, but also wins in the city. America is not everything anymore and we turn our attention to Africa