A total of 726 immigrants arrived on the coast of the Canary Islands on Tuesday in six different precarious boats. The largest canoe located at sea, and then driven to the island of El Hierro, had 280 people on board, according to Reuters. This is the largest barge to reach the coasts of the archipelago since the so-called Canary route began in 1994.
“I don’t remember any canoe of that size. The maximum on the route, that I remember, was 234 people,” confirmed the head of the teams that the Red Cross deploys in the docks of the Canary Islands with each arrival of immigrants, José Antonio Rodríguez Verona. .
The boat, 28 to 30 meters long and four meters wide, was detected by the Salvamar Adhara when it was just one kilometer from the coast. The cayuco, painted in multiple colors, in the traditional use of Senegal fishermen, transported mainly young adult men. There were also two women and ten minors, one a very small child. People were packed together in rows of eight to ten occupants each, without even space to open their arms.
After evaluation by staff from the Canary Emergency Service, three transfers were made to health centers, although in general they are all in good health.
A fourth barge arrived at the end of the day at the port of La Restinga, in El Hierro, with 23 occupants, bringing to 521 the total number of migrants arriving in the last 24 hours in four boats to this island of 268 kilometers and just over 11,000 inhabitants. The other two boats that arrived on the island in the last 24 hours were occupied by 127 and 91 people respectively.
The arrival of migrants along the well-known Canary Route has experienced an uptick in recent weeks. “This rebound confirms what we had said would happen, that with the arrival of the calms there was going to be a notable increase in arrivals,” said the regional president of the Canary Islands, Fernando Clavijo, on Tuesday.
On Monday, seven people disappeared when an inflatable boat with fifty occupants on board sank east of Lanzarote. The Canary Islands register an increase of 19.8% in the arrival of migrants to the islands in boats or cayucos in the first nine months of 2023 compared to the same period in 2022, according to data provided this Monday by the Spanish Ministry of the Interior.
In these first nine months, 14,976 migrants arrived in the Canary archipelago, when in the same period of 2022 12,506 did so, according to Interior data, which reflects, however, a decrease in the arrival of boats to the Canary Islands, 270 compared to 279 from last year, which implies a decrease of 3.2%.
The considerable increase in the arrival of people at the same time as the number of boats is reduced has to do with the growing presence of boats on the Canary Route since this summer, fishing boats capable of transporting between 100 and 200 people.
In Spain as a whole, migrant arrivals in small boats or precarious boats until September 30 increased by 20% compared to the same period of the previous year, although the pace of growth slows down with the end of summer.
The so-called Canary Boat Route was opened by two Sahrawis who arrived in a small wooden boat to Fuerteventura on August 28, 1994.
Since then, nearly 180,000 people have used it to reach the islands from the coast of Africa, on routes that range from the 100 kilometers that separate Lanzarote or Fuerteventura from the south of Morocco or the north of the Sahara, up to 1,000 or 1,200 kilometers. that travel through the canoes of Senegal.
The canoes appeared on the scene in 2005, to become the protagonists of the route the following year. Then, the maximum number of arrivals to the Canary Islands in a year was marked, with 31,678 people (double the number registered so far in 2023).
Records of boats with more than 200 people on board date back to that time, which became known as “the cayuco crisis”, such as the one that arrived in the south of Tenerife on September 30, 2008, with 229 occupants, which It is among the largest on the route.
