Express.co.uk
By Dominic Midgley
It is a tiny coastal enclave, part of a foreign state, surrounded by the country that lost it hundreds of years ago.
As its economy is much healthier than its neighbour, thousands of workers flock across its border every day to work.
And the nation on whose land mass it sits has been desperate to get it back for centuries but the vast majority of the population are virulently opposed to the idea. Sound familiar?
Very probably. However it’s not Gibraltar but Ceuta, a Spanish possession 17 miles across the Mediterranean from the Rock in Morocco. And Spain has not one but two Gibraltar-like enclaves there, with Melilla 250 miles down the coast in exactly the same position.
Their existence throws into sharp relief the hypocrisy of Madrid, which has capitalised on the invoking of Article 50 to reassert its claim to the territory it ceded to Britain under the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713.
