Santa Cruz de la Mar Pequeña (literally Holy Cross of the Little Sea) was a Spanish settlement in the Western coast of Africa, across from the Canary Islands, founded in 1476 as a trading post with a fortress. It was located close to a lagoon -hence its name- presently named Foum Agoutir, not far of Cape Juby in the extreme South of Morocco.
The importance of the settlement was derived from its position in the trans-Saharan slave trade, and captives were shipped to sugar plantations on the Canary Islands.
The Spanish were expelled from the area in 1524 by the Berbers. After its abandonment, the exact location of Santa Cruz de la Mar Pequeña was forgotten, to the point that when, in 1916, the Spanish gained control of the Cape Juby Strip, which included the location, they assigned it a new name, Puerto Cansado.
On the other hand, in the mid-nineteenth century, during the Scramble for Africa, France and Spain laid conflicting claims over the Maghreb, and Spain became interested in its lost medieval fortress in order to claim the southern part of Morocco, and for no clear reason Ifni, more than 300 miles North from the real location, was wrongly considered the most likely area; and consequently that territory was ceded to Spain by Morocco on 1860.