El Hierro continues to be the main destination for cayucos that travel the Canary Islands route. From Monday to Friday, a total of seven boats with more than 1,000 people on board reached the least populated island of the Canaries. The La Restinga dock has been, since the end of 2023, one of the symbols of the humanitarian emergency that the Archipelago is going through. However, this week’s rebound has once again limited El Hierro’s resources.
This Thursday, after intense days of consecutive rescues, 701 migrants remained in the Temporary Care Center for Foreigners (CATE) in Valverde, with a capacity of 800 people. The escalation of the war in Mali and the instability of the Sahel are some of the reasons that explain these arrivals, which coincide with the African tour of the President of the Spanish Government, Pedro Sánchez, to stop immigration.
Monday already heralded an intense week of rescues. On August 26, two pirogues were detected with 136 and 51 people on board. The next day, 244 migrants were located in two other boats. This Thursday, the number of barges rescued near El Hierro rises to four, with a total of 755 survivors. One of these last pirogues had been damaged in the middle of the Atlantic.
To reach the most remote island of the Canaries, the cayucos undertake long and dangerous journeys that often end in death. In other cases, survivors arrive exhausted and dehydrated. Day after day, the health workers of El Hierro face the most difficult side of the Canary Islands route. “We know that we have to continue and we will continue. We will continue to do the same thing and see calamities, yes, but we will continue until the body holds up. “I don’t know how long and I’m not interested, but I know that we will endure it because they need us,” said the medical director of the island hospital, Luis González, in an interview with this newspaper. “We will not hesitate to take more teams, more guards and give everything we have of ourselves,” he added.
With this in mind, the Government of the Canary Islands has announced that a specific primary care team will travel to the island to attend to migrants. The aim is to be able to assist those who may arrive in the coming weeks and to ensure that emergency and other health services are not diminished, as Fernando Clavijo pointed out this Thursday. On the other hand, as Efe reported, the Red Cross has set up almost 200 tent beds in the San Andrés sports centre, next to the current CATE, to cope with the new arrivals on the island.
Morocco’s tightening of border controls has shifted departures to the south of the continent. Mauritania, Gambia and Senegal have become the main countries of departure for the white and colourful pirogues arriving in the Canary Islands. In the first months of the year, the Mauritanian country was the point of departure for 83% of migrants arriving in the archipelago. Among them were hundreds of Malians fleeing a country mired in war for more than a decade.
The armed conflict has worsened in recent weeks, pushing more people towards the ocean. However, for Malian refugees, Mauritania is not only a place of transit, but also a place of destination. As reported by the IOM (International Organization for Migration), refugees from the north and center of the country are well settled and rooted in the neighboring territory.
The small island of El Hierro, with just over 11,000 inhabitants, is the last piece of land that African migrants encounter before being lost forever in the Atlantic. The lethality of the journey has led to the appearance of a few pirogues on the other side of the planet. The last one was spotted by a group of fishermen on the coast of the Dominican Republic. Inside, there were only skeletons and documents proving that its occupants were Africans whose main destination was the Canary Islands.
