Five hundred and eighteen migrants arrived aboard six boats in the Spanish Canary Islands over the past twenty-four hours, taking one of the most dangerous migratory routes in the world, emergency services announced on Friday, October 6. at sea to Agence France-Presse (AFP).
According to a maritime rescue spokeswoman, three boats with 275 people on board were taken care of on the island of El Hierro, the westernmost of the Canaries. Two other boats arrived on the island of Tenerife and a final one on the island of Gran Canaria.
According to this spokesperson, these migrants, originally from sub-Saharan Africa, were taken care of by the Spanish authorities, faced for several weeks with a significant increase in arrivals in this archipelago located a few dozen kilometers from the coast of Morocco.
As of Tuesday, 280 migrants had arrived aboard a single boat in El Hierro, the largest number of passengers ever to arrive on a single boat, according to maritime rescue. In all, more than 1,200 migrants have arrived on this small island of 11,000 inhabitants over the past week. These massive arrivals led the Spanish authorities to transfer nearly 500 migrants from the island of El Hierro to Tenerife during the night of Thursday to Friday.
Particularly dangerous crossing
Spain, and particularly the Canary Islands, a few dozen kilometers from the Moroccan coast, is one of the main entry points for illegal migrants into Europe. The Canaries saw 14,976 migrants arrive between January 1 and September 30, an increase of 19.8% compared to the same period in 2022, according to the latest figures from the Spanish Interior Ministry.
Tragedy is frequent there, the crossing being particularly dangerous. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) regularly report deadly shipwrecks – the unofficial toll of which, according to them, amounts to dozens, if not hundreds of deaths – in Moroccan, Spanish or international waters.
These new arrivals come even as European leaders are gathered in Granada, in the south of Spain, for an informal summit where one of the main themes will be the thorny subject of immigration, added to the agenda at following the recent influx of thousands of migrants to the small Italian island of Lampedusa.
On Wednesday, the ambassadors of European Union countries agreed on a key regulation of European migration reform, setting up a mandatory solidarity mechanism between member states in the event that one of them is facing “massive” arrivals of migrants, as Italy has recently. Poland and Hungary voted against the text; Austria, Slovakia and the Czech Republic abstained.
