In July 2025, the Spanish Navy frigate Méndez Núñez made port calls at the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force (JMSDF) bases in Yokosuka and Kure. While the Spanish Navy’s training ship Juan Sebastián de Elcano has visited Japan on multiple occasions in the past, this marks the first visit by a Spanish combatant vessel since the arrival of the combat cruiser Don Juan de Austria in 1894 — a span of 131 years.
Méndez Núñez is the fourth ship of the Álvaro de Bazán-class frigates, of which the Spanish Navy operates five. Commissioned in 2006, the vessel is relatively compact yet equipped with the Aegis Combat System. It served as a foundational design for other nations’ Aegis system-equipped warships, including the Royal Norwegian Navy’s Fridtjof Nansen-class and the Royal Australian Navy’s Hobart-class destroyers. In this deployment, Méndez Núñez is operating as a component of the United Kingdom Carrier Strike Group (CSG), centered around the Royal Navy aircraft carrier HMS Prince of Wales, currently deployed to the Indo-Pacific region. The visit to Japan was conducted as part of a temporary independent sortie.
At Yokosuka Naval Base, the ship opened its interior to members of the press. The Spanish Navy has begun outfitting its forward-deployed vessels with Starlink terminals, and Méndez Núñez, having departed its homeport in April for a six-month overseas deployment that will conclude in October, is no exception. The ship is equipped with three terminals: one is dedicated to crew members’ personal communications and email access; another provides secure access to the Spanish Navy’s internal intranet, with encrypted shipboard communications; and the third, colloquially referred to by the crew as the “UK Net,” was brought aboard by the Royal Navy specifically for intra-CSG communications. This UK terminal will be removed once the deployment concludes and the ship returns to Spain.
Spanish Navy to Dispatch Task Group to Indo-Pacific — CO Confirms
Commander Jaime Salvador Muñoz-Delgado Pérez, Commanding Officer of Méndez Núñez, responding during an interview (Credit: Author)
At the end of the ship tour, Commander Jaime Salvador Muñoz-Delgado Pérez, the Commanding Officer of Méndez Núñez, gave an interview. When asked what the most challenging aspect of the deployment has been, he responded:
“Probably the most challenging aspect of our deployment here is logistics. So we are very far away from our base. We’ve been deployed for three months and we need support for logistics. We are not coming to this region very often. We don’t have bases here. What we need is a lot of support from Spain and it is working very well. But the original idea is we need to prove that we are able to deploy very far away from home. And well, that’s what is happening and it’s working pretty well.”
Commander Muñoz-Delgado further confirmed that, within the next year or two, the Spanish Navy intends to deploy a task group composed solely of Armada Española vessels to the Indo-Pacific, including a visit to Japan.
The bridge of Méndez Núñez. Typically, five to six crew members are stationed here during navigation (Credit: Author)
The medical bay aboard Méndez Núñez. The onboard monitor allows for video conferencing with the Spanish Navy’s central military hospital (Credit: Author)
The petty officers’ mess aboard Méndez Núñez (Credit: Author)
“We are here for a reason. So this was a firm decision by the Spanish Navy, the Spanish authorities and the armed forces after everything that happened in Ukraine. So we are really committed to continue deploying in the Pacific region. And that’s something that—this is like a first step, but there will be hopefully more steps in the future.
Hopefully in one or two years, more ships of the Armada will come to the region. And not only one ship in another nation’s group, but a Spanish group in the future. So that’s the goal and that’s the idea, and that’s why we are starting here and we will continue in the near future. So Spain is really committed to the region, to our friends and allies in the Pacific, especially with Japan, and we would like to continue with this kind of activities.”
Following her port calls in Japan, Méndez Núñez is scheduled to rejoin the Prince of Wales CSG in early August, before once again detaching to return home ahead of the group. The ship is slated to make port visits in the Philippines, Thailand, Singapore, and Malaysia before arriving back in Spain in October.
Japanese and Spanish personnel posing for a commemorative photo in front of Méndez Núñez (Credit: Author)
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