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“We were told the Atlantic ocean would be at its calmest by late August but I’ve never experienced anything like it before”, Kevin Omar, an 18-year-old from Gambia, told Byline Times.
In the summer of 2023, he boarded a crowded migrant boat on an 800km journey from Senegal in West Africa to Spain’s Canary Islands — a deadly route thousands of other people have taken in the last year.
“There were 120 of us onboard for six days, with no room to move. I kept thinking that at any moment we would all die – that the waves would just snap the boat in half or capsize us,” he said, recalling how the passengers had no food during the last three days, and no water for two.
“By the end, we were so desperate that people were even thinking of drinking seawater. When we finally saw the island on the seventh day you can’t imagine how we celebrated. I prayed as we came into the harbour,” Omar said.
A year later, Omar is working as a volunteer translator at the same migrant reception centre where he spent his first night in Spain. It is on the small, volcanic island of El Hierro – the epicentre of the Canaries’ current surge in irregular migration.
Located 120km west of Tenerife, El Hierro has received 13,000 irregular migrants this year – 2,000 more than its number of permanent residents. During one weekend in February 2023, more than a thousand arrived.
“More than 450 people arrived today alone, nearly all in good health”, explains Omar. “It is not always like that.”
You see people with terrible muscle problems. Others are covered with open sores, their skin destroyed by the sun or infection after ten, twelve, even fifteen days on the ocean
Kevin Omar
Francis Mendoza, the coordinator of the local volunteer group where Omar works, remembers one case in particular of this type of agonising skin infection from November 2023, when a young man from Mali “arrived at the centre in a very bad way”.
His legs, feet and genitals were covered in sores – caused by having to sit for days in seawater contaminated with human waste and engine fuel that had collected at the bottom of the boat.
“He was quickly brought to the hospital. After two days he called his uncle with whom he had travelled and seemed to be doing a lot better”, Mendoza continued. “You should have seen how his uncle was smiling after talking to him. It gave us all a lift during a very intense period.”
The next morning the phone rang, Mendoza recalls: “His condition had taken a turn and the young man had died overnight. I then had to give his uncle the news. It was heartbreaking.”
Such deaths are all too common along the arduous, long-distance Atlantic route, where boats depart from across a 600km stretch of the west African coast to the popular Spanish holiday islands. Most of the boats currently arriving to El Hierro are departing from Mauritania and northern Senegal while others reaching islands such as Lanzarote set off from southern Morocco and the Western Sahara.
According to figures from the Spanish NGO Caminando Fronteras, the route is the most deadly migrant crossing in the world — with the number of dead and disappeared totalling 4,808 people in the first five months of 2024.
“The vast majority of victims disappear at sea without a trace”, explains Mendoza. “Boats have also washed up in places like Costa Rica or the Dominican Republic having drifted for months across the Atlantic with no one onboard left alive.”
In the latest tragedy, during the early hours of 28 September, a migrant boat carrying 84 people capsized close to El Hierro’s coast as the Spanish coastguard attempted a rescue in strong winds. Nine bodies were recovered, including that of a child aged between 12 and 15; 48 others remain missing.
“The public reaction has been one of consternation”, says Juan Carlos Lorenzo, the Canaries coordinator for the Spanish Refugee Aid Commission.
“In such conditions rescue operations are always challenging. It is a tragedy — the single worst loss of life along the coastline of the Canary Islands in thirty years and once again highlights the lethal reality of Europe’s borders.”
Changing Migration Flows
Despite such risks, increasing numbers have braved the Atlantic over the last year. A record 31,000 undocumented migrants arrived in the Canaries between January and September, an increase of 113% compared to the same period in 2023.
A key factor driving this surge is the worsening armed conflict in Mali, which has seen at least 200,000 refugees displaced to neighbouring Mauritania. On the back of this, Malians have become the largest national group among those arriving to the archipelago by sea for the first time, overtaking Senegalese and Moroccans.