Volunteers who feed the street cat colonies of Ceuta, the Spanish enclave on the north African coast, have reported that animals have gone missing and feeding sites have been abandoned. They said informal migrant camps had gone up on the ground where the cats live.
The Spanish newspaper La Gaceta reported that colonies beside the enclave’s desalination plant and in Huerta Téllez, Carmelitas, calle Goya, Príncipe, Sidi Embarek and Punta Blanca were among the worst affected. Groups settling at those points had pushed the animals off their territory, carers said.
Cats attach themselves to a fixed patch of ground and a forced move leaves them exposed to hunger, thirst and traffic, according to the volunteers. They said they did not know where the missing animals had gone.
One carer responsible for a colony said she had found several cats dead in violent circumstances, among them mutilated animals and others with wounds that appeared to have been made by a sharp object. She also reported finding pigeons and gulls partly eaten.
The volunteers did not link any of the deaths to the new arrivals, saying they had no evidence pointing to anyone. They asked instead for proper temporary sites so that camps would not form on colony ground, and for more help from the city.
Ceuta’s administration is responsible for the colonies under Spain’s 2023 animal welfare law, which obliges local authorities to run management programmes covering census work, sterilisation and veterinary care.
Councillor for health and social services Nabila Benzina told the city assembly in April that Ceuta still had no complete census of its colonies. A decree published in the official gazette in January stated that the enclave had no formally authorised or regulated colonies at all.
The strain followed the mass crossing of July 30, when Spain’s interior ministry put arrivals at about 50,000 and Ceuta mayor-president Juan Jesús Vivas gave a figure of around 60,000 in a city of some 84,000 people.
The enclave’s temporary migrant centre has been overwhelmed ever since and camps have spread to beaches, waste ground and neighbourhood sports pitches. The Spanish Government has sent a migration ministry team to speed up provisional reception sites, while residents’ associations in Sidi Embarek and Príncipe have set deadlines for the camps to be cleared.
The volunteers said they had kept feeding the colonies without a break through the pandemic and the 2021 border crisis. They want the city to help trace the animals that are still missing.
