Spain looks like an Iberian slab with islands in the Atlantic. Two Spanish cities do not sit on that slab. They sit in Africa and share a border with Morocco.
Ceuta and Melilla are autonomous cities, not colonies to tick off. People who live there live in Spain, vote in Spain and stand at an EU external border that does not run through the Pyrenees.
Spain at a glance
Capital
Madrid
Area
505,992 km²
Population
49.4 million
Official language(s)
Spanish
Currency
Euro
Continent
Europe
Distinctive fact
EU land border in Africa
The peninsula is not the whole country
On the Iberian peninsula Spain shares land borders with Portugal, France and Andorra. The Balearics lie in the Mediterranean, the Canaries in the Atlantic off Africa. Ceuta and Melilla sit on the African mainland. The country data list four neighbours, and one of them is Morocco.
49.4 million people live in this state on 505,992 square kilometres. Most of them on the peninsula. The thesis does not hang on the count. It hangs on the state treating its African cities not as an exception but as Spanish territory.
The EU land border in Africa is not a metaphor. It has fences, offices and residents.
— TerraTally · Countries desk
A state made of nations that call themselves that
Spanish is the state's official language. In Catalonia, the Basque Country and Galicia, Catalan, Basque and Galician are co-official. The autonomous communities are not decoration. They have their own parliaments and argue with Madrid over powers, ever since the 1978 constitution built the state that way.
Tell Spain only as bulls and beaches and you leave out this order of dispute. It is daily life: schools, police, the language on the office sign. The African cities belong in that same order, not in a different story.
Two seas and a strait
Spain sits on the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. The Strait of Gibraltar is narrow enough that Africa is visible from Tarifa. That is not a poetic turn. It is why Ceuta sits so close to the European shore and still on another continent.
The Canaries lie so far south-west that they belong climatically to Africa and politically to Spain. No second country starts from there. The same administration starts, the same currency, the same citizenship. Think Spain only as far as Cádiz and you drop a whole group of provinces in the Atlantic.
Spain is easy to draw as an Iberian slab and incomplete without Africa. The state decided not to treat Ceuta and Melilla as outside.