12 cayucos carrying 1,235 people reached El Hierro on Saturday, and two more boats reached Gran Canaria and Tenerife. The Canaries saw 1,488 arrivals in a day and over 2,300 in two days; President Clavijo said they are overwhelmed.
On Saturday, 14 November, 12 large wooden boats arrived in El Hierro carrying 1,235 people. Another 203 people on a boat were intercepted in Gran Canaria. 50 others arrived on a vessel in Tenerife.
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The total number, 1,488 people, is a record high for the Canary Islands since 33 small boats and large canoes carrying 1,461 people arrived on 7 November 2020. There were 108 women and 167 minors among yesterday’s arrivals, according to provisional data.
Saturday’s figures do not include two rescue operations still under way or the 122 people travelling in a large canoe that reached La Restinga at 23:55 on Friday. 843 people arrived in 8 boats. The total for the two days is 2,331 people on 22 boats.
A migration system at breaking point
The operation deployed six Maritime Rescue vessels (Diphda, Acrux, Navia, Alpheratz, Mizar and Urania) and two Civil Guard patrol boats (Río Tajo and Río Guadiato).
As of Saturday, there were 317 people at El Hierro’s Temporary Foreigners’ Reception Centre (CATE) , not counting the latest arrivals. 158 people were transferred to Tenerife on the regular ferry service. Eleven people from previous arrivals remain in hospital at Nuestra Señora de los Reyes Island Hospital.
The Canary Islands president, Fernando Clavijo, said that the consistent arrival of boats this month has completely overwhelmed the island’s resources. El Hierro’s island council had already declared a social emergency after the arrival of more than 8,000 people over five weeks.
Clavijo wrote to the European Commissioner for Migration, Magnus Brunner, calling for urgent action in response to the upsurge on the Atlantic route, and announced that Pedro Sánchez had pledged to urgently convene an Interministerial Commission on Immigration. The Minister for Territorial Policy, Ángel Víctor Torres, is due to visit the port of La Restinga on Sunday.
Why are they arriving now and what are people demanding on the island?
The Interior Ministry recorded 6,194 arrivals in October, the month with the greatest migratory pressure on the route since 2023. Forecasts do not point to a decline before December, when weather conditions change along the route of more than 1,000 kilometres linking the Canary Islands with Senegal, Gambia and Mauritania. Canary Islands authorities attribute the surge to a loss of control by the Senegalese security forces, which have been deployed for sporting events in Dakar.
Thimbo Samb, a Senegalese man who has lived in Spain for 20 years, is the central figure in the documentary 'Los cayucos de Kayar', nominated for the Goya Awards.
He links the rise in migration to Ousmane Sonko’s declining influence, saying that President Bassirou Diomaye Faye removed Sonko from government a few months ago. The dismissal intensified the lack of hope caused by corruption and the shortage of work. Samb reached Spain at the age of 17, on his fourth attempt, and argues that safer channels should exist for people to migrate from Africa to Europe.
Txema Santana, a former adviser to the Canary Islands government on migration, believes that the people of El Hierro are not protesting against migrants themselves, but against the authorities’ slow or absent response. He is calling for services to be reinforced without waiting for the high season and for people to be moved off the island as quickly as possible to prevent collapse.