The Canary Islands are seeing more and more makeshift boats full of refugees arriving. In the last 24 hours, 518 of them have arrived aboard six boats on the Spanish archipelago, via one of the most dangerous migratory routes in the world, Sea Rescue said on Friday.
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.
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.
Nearly 300 on a single boat
According to this spokesperson, these migrants, originally from sub-Saharan Africa, were taken care of by the authorities, faced for several weeks with a significant increase in arrivals on this archipelago located off the northwest coast of the African continent. .
On Tuesday, 280 migrants arrived aboard a single boat in El Hierro, the largest number of passengers ever arrived on a single boat, according to maritime rescue. 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, where the authorities are overwhelmed, to Tenerife during the night of Thursday to Friday, according to an AFP correspondent present on site.