I counted 8 ships waiting to dock in Matosinhos port this morning on my coffee walk down to the beach and Praia Da Luz where Pyth Networks, one of the biggest crypto data oracles in the world, just chose to have their offsite last month. Heaven if you can find a decent job here and endure the locals in the neighborhood to some degree
Shipping is really the last and only real form of free trade left. Paper trading never really got there but there was a short time where it was free wheeling. When it comes to shipping between Southern Europe and Africa, you are talking about a total free-for-all run by many of the oldest and wealthiest families out there.
I have a friend from Hamilton who works in shipping who at one point asked me for interview advice for Evercore shipping research. She has worked in Dubai and many other places and has seen close enough to the shore and water operations to confirm that there is a lot of wiggle room in the trade of goods in the middle east and beyond. We are talking about the longshoreman’s union in the US, but outside the US it is a pretty porous world of “borders” in shipping.
The three kingdoms, Morocco, Spain and Portugal, have a special trade that goes back a very long time. Once you begin to understand the system with African soft currencies, resource extraction by former colonial powers, and seaborn trade, you will understand how Europe as a whole functions and what role each individual country plays to feed up to Northern Europe.