Migrants taken care of upon their arrival in the Canaries, in September 2020. -
Quique Curbelo
Such a rate had not been observed in the sector for more than a decade.
More than a thousand African migrants have arrived in the past 48 hours on the coasts of Spain's Canary Islands, Red Cross officials said on Saturday.
Since Thursday, 1,015 people have arrived aboard 37 boats on the islands of Lanzarote, Fuerteventura, Gran Canaria and Tenerife, the latter two being the furthest (250 to 300 km) from the African coast.
A spokesperson for the Red Cross said the migrants were from the Maghreb or sub-Saharan Africa and that they were in good health, despite "some" hypothermia "not serious".
Coronavirus tests were carried out on all migrants, the spokesperson added.
On the same basis as 2006
According to the spokesperson, this rate of arrivals is “more or less” the same as that of 2006, when 30,000 migrants arrived in the Canaries.
For several months, African migrants have resumed the route of the Canaries in preference to the Mediterranean due to border control agreements concluded with Libya, Turkey and Morocco.
From January 1 to September 30, 6,081 migrants thus arrived in these Spanish islands, six times more than for the same period of 2019, according to the Spanish Ministry of the Interior.
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