The territory in dispute lay far from the fabled port of Morocco, the place that Hubert Humphrey in Casablanca would make into an international melting pot of love and intrigue. The vast stretches of Western Sahara were barely populated at all, contained no vegetation and no wildlife. But it did have minerals — phosphates, which the Spanish (who still held control of the area) found valuable. Spain insisted on holding on to the land under increasing pressure from Morocco, who bordered the Sahara to the north and claimed it for themselves.

On this day, November 6, in 1975, as the International Court of Justice at the Hague was looking over the status of Sahara, at the call of Morocco’s Hassan II, some 350,000 Moroccans crossed into the desert to demand a return of the land to them.

Spain remembered well the bloody colonial war that its neighboring Portugal had just ended, and decided it was better to negotiate with the Moroccans. They brought in to the negotiations Mauritania, who also laid claim to the land, and divided the land between the two. For their part, the Spanish were promised 35% of the phosphorus mine production.