Nearly 1,500 African migrants have arrived on the coast of the Canary Islands since Saturday October 21, notably aboard a boat carrying a record number of 321 people, the rescue services of the Spanish archipelago announced on Sunday off the coast of Morocco.
In total, 1,427 migrants reached the islands in different precarious boats between the night of Friday and Saturday and the morning of Sunday, emergency services announced on the social network X (formerly Twitter). Migrant arrivals have been increasing in recent weeks.
The migrants come from sub-Saharan Africa, a spokesperson for the emergency services told AFP. On Saturday, a wooden canoe reached El Hierro island with 321 people on board, an emergency services spokeswoman told AFP. The previous record for the number of passengers on a single boat arriving in the Canaries was 280 people on October 3.
Public television channel TVE showed images of the colorful boat’s arrival at the port on Saturday, crowded with smiling and waving migrants around them. According to the latest figures from the Spanish Interior Ministry, the archipelago received 23,537 migrants between January 1 and October 15, almost 80% more than the same period last year.
During the first two weeks of October, 8,561 migrants arrived, a record figure according to Spanish media since a previous migration crisis in 2006. This “resurgence” of arrivals is linked to “the destabilization in the Sahel,” said the minister. of the Spanish interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska during a visit to the Canaries this week.
The migration route through the Canaries has been very busy in recent years due to the tightening of controls in the Mediterranean Sea. But shipwrecks are frequent during these long and dangerous crossings aboard small boats from Morocco or Western Sahara, about a hundred kilometers away, but also, further south, from Mauritania, Senegal and even Gambia. , about a thousand kilometers away.