Grove Koger
It’s Santa Cruz de la Mar Pequeña that I’m referring to, or Holy Cross of the Little Sea—a Spanish fort lying somewhere on the coast of Northwest Africa.
For Spain’s Africanistas, who supported a more aggressive colonial presence in Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was a reminder of their country’s early and illustrious activities on the continent.
And that takes us back to 1468 and Diego García de Herrera, a Castilian knight who controlled several of the Canary Islands, including Fuerteventura. Operating under a concession from King Enrique IV of Castile, Herrera organized an expedition to build and garrison a modest fortress and trading post—Santa Cruz de la Mar Pequeña—on the African coast that year. The fort took its name from a nearby lagoon known as the Mar Pequeña, or “Little Sea.”
Herrera and his compatriots hoped to take advantage of the trans-Saharan trade, establish a fishing station, and, as they had decimated the Canaries’ indigenous population, procure slaves to work on the islands’ sugar cane plantations.
When Herrera died in 1485, Santa Cruz was abandoned, only to be rebuilt by Alonso Fajardo in 1496 as a direct possession of the Castilian monarchy. It was attacked two years later by Portuguese troops (apparently in league with Herrera’s widow), and although it survived, its demise finally came in 1524 when it was sacked by forces of the Saadi dynasty of Morocco. By then, Spanish colonial interests had shifted to the New World, and the country’s attention returned to Northwest Africa only in the mid-1880s, when Spain began establishing modest trading posts and forts along the coast of what would become the colony of Rio de Oro.
However, the exact location of Santa Cruz de la Mar Pequeña had long since been forgotten. Although there was little reason to think so, Spanish authorities decided that the site lay near the coastal Moroccan settlement of Sidi Ifni, northeast of Rio de Oro, and in light of this dubious identification, Spain eventually established the tiny colony of Ifni there.
More recently, researchers have finally identified the ruins of the fort, farther to the southwest and opposite Fuerteventura, near the extensive Naila Lagoon in what’s now Morocco’s Khenifiss National Park. Dr. Mariano Gambín García describes the discovery in his book La Torre de Santa Cruz de la Mar Pequeña (Le Canarien, 2015).
The image of the top of today’s post (by D.C. Alvarez Dumont) appeared in “Intereses Españoles en Marruecos” in the weekly Madrid periodical La Ilustracion Española y Americana XXXII (1882), and makes what was then the accepted identification of Sidi Ifni as the site of the fort. Its caption reads (in translation) “Mouth of the Ifni River, where Santa Cruz de Mar Pequeña is located. Section of the coast. Customs of the Berbers. Outpost of the caravan of Timbuctu, parading before the ruins of the tower of Herrera (Burg-el-Rumi). Sidi Ifni shrine and graveyard.” The postage stamp from Spanish Sahara (as Rio de Oro eventually became known) was issued in 1961, and the map of the Canary Islands and the nearby African coast dates from 1823. The striking photograph of the lagoon in the Khenifiss National Park is by TarfayaMedia and is reproduced courtesy of Wikimedia Commons under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.
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