Almost half a century after Spain left Western Sahara, barely 200,000 people live in the south of the territory of the former colony. Almost all of them are located in Dakhla (170,000 residents), the old Villa Cisneros, stranded on a narrow peninsula between the turbulent Atlantic and an inland bay. Morocco has been promoting a flood of investments around Dakhla in recent years, especially since the United States recognized its sovereignty in 2020 over a territory that the UN still considers “non-autonomous” or pending decolonization. The deluge of billions in infrastructure such as a large port, and desalination and energy plants, aspires to crown the control exercised over the Sahara by Rabat, whose authorities seek to double the population census in its southern part through an economic growth plan accelerated, until reaching 400,000 inhabitants on the horizon of 2050. “Permanent wind and more than 3,000 hours of sunshine per year are the best future for an economic ecosystem with clean energy,” predicts Munir Huari, director of the Regional Investment Center ( CRI) from Dakhla.
Last November, King Mohamed VI announced the so-called Atlantic Initiative to offer in Dakhla an exit to the sea for Sahel countries such as Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Chad, whose representatives he met the following month in Marrakesh. The speech coincided with the 48th anniversary of the Green March, the massive human displacement organized by his father, Hassan II, to break into Spanish territory in the fall of 1975, while the dictator Francisco Franco was dying.
The Maghreb country seeks to repeat in Dakhla and its surroundings the growth multiplier effect that the construction of the Tangier Med port in the Moroccan Strait region represented two decades ago, now with a projection towards central and western Africa. While Morocco concentrates its investment plans for the Sahara in Dakhla, Laayoune and the north, with more than 700,000 inhabitants currently, the authorities only expect a population growth of 5% in the next three decades.
Demography is also a political weapon in the territorial dispute that hangs over the former colony, where a million people now live, mostly from Morocco. The Spanish National Institute of Statistics registered nearly 75,000 Sahrawis in the Sahara, along with 30,000 Spaniards, in the 1974 census, before leaving the territory. According to Spanish sources familiar with the former colony, the UN counted between 1991 and 2007, when the preparation of the census for the self-determination referendum was interrupted, some 130,000 potential voters of Sahrawi origin. The Polisario, for its part, assures that in the Tindouf camps there are 173,600 refugees with the right to vote.
The port of Dakhla Atlantic now emerges from the waters 40 kilometers north of the city that gives it its name. The Moroccan engineers show the project to the visitor on a wind-beaten coast, in a desert landscape where a few greenhouses emerge in the valleys. “The port infrastructure is destined to be one of the three largest in Morocco after Tangier Med and Casablanca,” says a person responsible for the work. The new port facility has been built since 2021 as an artificial island, with a budget of more than 1,250 million euros. Nearly a thousand technicians and operators already work there. The project is now 20% visible, and will not be completed until 2028.
A bridge (still a rock and earth dam) extends 1.3 kilometers out to sea into deep water. Part of the dock closest to the coast is also emerging, among the three that the port facilities will have: one for fishing, another for goods (35 million tons per year) and a third for ship repair yards. “It is foreseeable that green hydrogen and green ammonia, obtained through renewable energies in the Sahara, will also have an outlet in the future through Atlantic Dakhla,” anticipates the director of the CRI.
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Next to the new port, an industrial and logistics zone of 1,650 hectares is planned to rise, linked to the new road communications axis of the Sahara. Morocco has announced by the end of this year the completion of the highway from Dakhla to Tiznit, 1,065 kilometers to the north, with a cost that has been around 1,000 million euros.
This entire network of infrastructure and massive investments is supported by two essential legs. On the one hand, a gigantic desalination plant to produce 100,000 cubic meters of water per day in the desert. The Government of Rabat hopes to irrigate 5,000 hectares of land, where now there are only about 100 hectares with greenhouses for early harvests of cherry tomatoes and blueberries. On the other hand, a wind farm with the capacity to produce 40 megawatts and provide energy to all the planned facilities, with a cost of 200 million euros.
“Dajla has already changed,” boasts Huari, a London-educated economist and exponent of the new Moroccan technocratic class, who hopes to create some 100,000 jobs in the next quarter of a century in the south of Western Sahara. The director of the Dakhla CRI recalls that the entire territory has tax exemptions and direct state subsidies to attract labor and companies.
Since 2003, King Pelagique, one of the largest fishing and canning companies in Morocco, which exports to more than 50 countries, has located its factory near the current port of Dakhla. Fishing activity accounts for a quarter of the economy of southern Sahara. In a visit to the King Pelagique facilities, it is observed that half of the employees (2,400, according to company records) who work cutting fish tails or sealing cans are of sub-Saharan origin, the majority of them women. “They all have a contract and earn the minimum wage‚ about 320 euros per month,” says Reda Chami, general director of the company, who assures that it is not easy to find labor in Dakhla.
Business promotion in the former colonial metropolis
For the first time, Morocco has taken the promotion of business and investment in the south of the Sahara to Spain, the former colonial metropolis, in a presentation coordinated last April with the Madrid Chamber of Commerce. The CRI of Dakhla has announced that the Spanish chain Senator is preparing to open a new hotel in the city. And, although Spanish fishing vessels have not been fishing in Saharan waters since last summer, after the expiration of the protocol of the fishing agreement, there continue to be mixed companies with at least 51% Moroccan capital, owned by Spanish shipowners and equipped with boats with Spanish skippers. . The representative of the Polisario Front in Spain, Abdullah Arabi, then warned that investing in the Dakhla region contravenes International Law by “involving Spanish companies in the plundering of Sahrawi resources.”
Morocco also spares no expense to promote tourism in Dakhla, which is on track to go from 3,000 to 5,000 hotel beds, and shows the world its development investment plans. Habat Michan Mohamed, 64, vice president of the Dakhla Chamber of Commerce, also traveled to Madrid to attend the business forum last April. “We are an autonomy, a region of Morocco. Here there are leaders who have come from the Polisario, and the United Nations knows that well,” this businessman from the hospitality sector says in Spanish, in his office in the coastal city. “In the face of political difficulties, development is imposed,” he emphasizes, “we do not want to be another Syria.”
Brahim Hameyada, 76, a Spanish teacher and director of the Unamuno academy, the only center recognized by the Cervantes Institute in Dakhla, also speaks fluent Spanish, where he returned in 1992 after having served in the ranks of the Polisario Front in Tindouf as cultural activist. Today it tries to safeguard the Spanish historical memory in the city in the south of the Sahara, since a first colonial military fort was built in 1886, which was demolished by Morocco a decade ago. “The Spanish legacy still survives in the lighthouse, in the church of Nuestra Señora del Carmen, or in areas of the old town,” he explains, “but the language is being lost, despite the efforts that some of us make.” Son of a Sahrawi soldier from the colonial nomadic troops, Hameyada has a Spanish passport. He prefers not to enter politics and remain focused on his mission of teaching the language in which he studied as a child in Villacisneros. “Let it be in any way [anexión, autonomía o independencia]he concludes, “but the Sahara conflict must reach a solution so that we can maintain our cultural identity, which is in danger.”

Yanya el Jatat: “Polisario members just have to return from Tindouf, like I did, and stand for election”
“I was born in Spanish territory, 63 years ago. I was with the Polisario Front from 1978 in Tindouf (Algeria) until I returned to the Sahara in 1992. Now I am the main elected authority of the Dakhla-Río de Oro region since 2015,” Yanya el Jatat, regional president of the south of the Western Sahara, dressed in a white daraa, the traditional tribal tunic of the territory. He was born in the then Spanish province number 53, where he was educated in Villacisneros under the educational system of the metropolis. While offering tea served according to the Sahrawi ritual in his house next to the inner bay of Dakhla, near one of the best areas of the Sahara for kitesurfing (kitesurfing), he remembers that the Dakhla area has already exceeded 110,000. inhabitants to 200,000 in the last decade.
Ask. Do you consider that you have autonomy within Morocco?
Answer. Now we are in the advanced regionalization phase of the 2011 Constitution, it is a step forward. Final autonomy would be negotiated later.
Q. With who?
R. With Algeria, which is the other party. The Polisario has no initiative. In 2019, I participated in the last round of round tables organized by the UN in Geneva.
Q. You were with the Polisario Front in Tindouf.
R. Since 1991, more than 12,000 Sahrawis have returned from the Tindouf camps, where no more than 40,000 people should remain. The situation there is catastrophic. Morocco is open. Polisario members just have to return, as I did, legalize themselves as a party and stand for election. The only condition is to accept autonomy within Morocco.
Q. Can economic development serve to unblock conflict?
R. People cannot stay in the hell of the camps while their relatives prosper in Dakhla or Laayoune. 80% of the Sahrawis are here. Who does Polisario represent in Tindouf, where there is no electoral roll?
Q. How do you see the statement by the President of the Spanish Government in favor of autonomy?
R. It’s realistic. And no one knows the Sahara better than Spain.
Q. Do you fear that it could be reversed after an alternation in power?
R. The national interest prevails. The Popular Party already governed at the time and did not change socialist policies.
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