Chafarinas Islands


The Chafarinas Islands, also spelled Zafarin, Djaferin or Zafarani, are a group of three Spanish small islets located in the Alboran Sea off the coast of Africa with an aggregate area of, to the east of Nador and off the Moroccan town of Ras Kebdana. They are uninhabited except for a garrison of the Spanish Army, though there was also a civil population roughly between the mid-19th and mid-20th centuries.
The Chafarinas Islands are one of the Spanish territories in North Africa off the Moroccan coast known as plazas de soberanía. The islands are administered by Spain but also claimed by Morocco as part of its territory alongside other Spanish overseas territories in Northern Africa.

History

These offshore islands were probably the Tres Insulae of the Romans and the Zafrān of the Arabs.
They were uninhabited and unclaimed in 1848, when the French government decided to occupy them, in order to monitor the tribes living in the border area between Morocco and French-ruled Algeria. A small expedition under the command of then Colonel MacMahon left Oran by sea and by land in January 1848 to take possession of the islands. Forewarned by its consul in Oran, Spain, which also coveted the Chafarinas, quickly dispatched a warship to the islands from Málaga. When the French arrived, the Spaniards had already taken possession of the islands in the name of Queen Isabella II.

Geography

The Chafarinas Islands are made up of three islands :
Under Spanish control since 1847, there is a 30-man military garrison on Isla Isabel II, the only stable population on the small archipelago, down from 426 people in 1900 and 736 people in 1910. Small numbers of scientists, anti-trafficking police, and other authorized personnel sometimes increase the population to around 50.

Natural history

The islands had relevance in Spanish environmentalist circles during the 1980s and 1990s, as the last individual of Mediterranean monk seal in Spanish territory lived there until it disappeared in the 1990s. Nine out of eleven of its marine invertebrates are considered endangered species and it is the home of the second largest colony of endangered Audouin's gull in the world. The islands have been recognised as an Important Bird Area by BirdLife International because they support, as well as the Audouin's gull colony, a breeding colony of Scopoli's shearwaters, with some 800–1,000 breeding pairs estimated in 2001–2004.