Ceuta (UK: /ˈsjuːtə/, US: /ˈseɪuːtə/,[6][7] Spanish: [ˈθewta, ˈsewta] ⓘ; Moroccan Arabic: سَبْتَة, romanized: Sabtah) is an autonomous city of Spain on the North African coast.

It was a regular municipality belonging to the province of Cádiz prior to the passing of its Statute of Autonomy in March 1995,[8] as provided by the Spanish Constitution, henceforth becoming an autonomous city.

The settlement below Jebel Musa was later renamed for the seven hills around the site, collectively referred to as the "Seven Brothers"[15] (Ancient Greek: Ἑπτάδελφοι, romanized: Heptádelphoi;[16] Latin: Septem Fratres).

The Phoenicians realized the extremely narrow isthmus joining the Peninsula of Almina to the African mainland made Ceuta eminently defensible and established an outpost there early in the 1st millennium BC.

After the Battle of Thapsus in 46 BC, Caesar and his heirs began annexing North Africa directly as Roman provinces but, as late as Augustus, most of Septem's Berber residents continued to speak and write in Punic.

Under Theodosius I in the late 4th century, Septem still had 10,000 inhabitants, nearly all Christian citizens speaking African Romance, a local dialect of Latin.

[21] Vandals, probably invited by Count Boniface as protection against the empress dowager, crossed the strait near Tingis around 425 and swiftly overran Roman North Africa.

Their king, Gaiseric, focused his attention on the rich lands around Carthage; although the Romans eventually accepted his conquests and he continued to raid them anyway, he soon lost control of Tingis and Septem in a series of Berber revolts.

When Justinian decided to reconquer the Vandal lands, his victorious general Belisarius continued along the coast, making Septem a westernmost outpost of the Byzantine Empire around 533.

Unlike the former ancient Roman administration, however, Eastern Rome did not push far into the hinterland and made the more defensible Septem their regional capital in place of Tingis.

Instead, the rapid Muslim conquest of Spain produced romances concerning Count Julian of Septem and his betrayal of Christendom in revenge for the dishonor that befell his daughter at King Roderick's court.

Allegedly with Julian's encouragement and instructions, the Berber convert and freedman Tariq ibn Ziyad took his garrison from Tangiers across the strait and overran the Spanish so swiftly that both he and his master Musa bin Nusayr fell afoul of a jealous caliph, who stripped them of their wealth and titles.

Sebta subsequently remained a small village of Muslims and Christians surrounded by ruins until its resettlement in the 9th century by Mâjakas, chief of the Majkasa Berber tribe, who started the short-lived Banu Isam dynasty.

[22] His great-grandson briefly allied his tribe with the Idrisids, but Banu Isam rule ended in 931[23] when he abdicated in favor of Abd ar-Rahman III, the Umayyad ruler of Córdoba, Spain.

After this, a period of political instability persisted, under competing interests from the Marinids and Granada as well as autonomous rule under the native Banu al-Azafi.

On the morning of 21 August 1415, King John I of Portugal led his sons and their assembled forces in a surprise assault that would come to be known as the Conquest of Ceuta.

The battle was almost anticlimactic, because the 45,000 men who traveled on 200 Portuguese ships caught the defenders of Ceuta off guard and suffered only eight casualties.

In the resulting treaty, Henry promised to deliver Ceuta back to the Marinids in return for allowing the Portuguese army to depart unmolested, which he reneged on.

The main area of Portuguese expansion, at this time, was the coast of the Maghreb, where there was grain, cattle, sugar, and textiles, as well as fish, hides, wax, and honey.

[25] Ceuta had to endure alone for 43 years, until the position of the city was consolidated with the taking of Ksar es-Seghir (1458), Arzila and Tangier (1471) by the Portuguese.

[26] Luís de Camões lived in Ceuta between 1549 and 1551, losing his right eye in battle, which influenced his work of poetry Os Lusíadas.

[clarification needed] While most of the military operations took place around the Royal Walls of Ceuta, there were also small-scale penetrations by Spanish forces at various points on the Moroccan coast, and seizure of shipping in the Strait of Gibraltar.

[34] On 5 November 2007, King Juan Carlos I visited the city, sparking great enthusiasm from the local population and protests from the Moroccan government.

[41] Ceuta has a maritime-influenced Mediterranean climate, similar to nearby Spanish and Moroccan cities such as Tarifa, Algeciras or Tangiers.

[43] Ceuta has relatively mild winters for the latitude, while summers are warm yet milder than in the interior of Southern Spain, due to the moderating effect of the Straits of Gibraltar.

[46] Owing to its small population, Ceuta elects only one member of the Congress of Deputies, the lower house of the Cortes Generales (the Spanish Parliament).

The present form of the cathedral dates to refurbishments undertaken in the late 17th century, combining baroque and neoclassical elements.

In Morocco, Ceuta is frequently referred to as the "occupied Sebtah", and the Moroccan government has argued that the city, along with other Spanish territories in the region, are colonies.

[90] This argument was originally developed by one of the founders of the Moroccan Istiqlal Party, Alal-El Faasi, who openly advocated for Morocco to invade and occupy Ceuta and other North African territories under Spanish rule.

Legal experts have claimed that other articles of the treaty could cover Spanish territories in North Africa but this interpretation has not been tested in practice.