The Women of the World's Most Backbreaking Border

As the sun rises over the chaotic borderland where Morocco flirts with Spain, hundreds of women report for an unthinkable daily grind.

Photos by Fernando Molina Cortés

If Safia Azizi hadn't been queuing at 7:20 a.m. by the narrow blue turnstiles along the border between Morocco and the Spanish town of Melilla, it might not have happened.

But she was. And this is usually the time of day when the Moroccan police open the barrier to the hundreds of women, most of them elderly, who cross from Morocco into Melilla, a Spanish-administered city along the coast of Morocco, to load their cargo.