According to the UN migration agency, 785 migrants from mostly western African countries died in the first eight months of this year trying to reach Spain's Canary Islands via the Atlantic. The month of August was particularly deadly. Meanwhile, over the weekend, some 340 migrants arrived on the island group on a single day.
The route from Africa to Spain continues to claim victims. On Thursday last week, a young migrant died while attempting to swim from Morocco to the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, while a new shipwreck with 64 people missing was reported off the southern coast of Western Sahara.
The migrant route between Western Africa and the Canary Islands is proving to be increasingly deadly, as 29 people -- including seven children -- died last Friday out of a total of 55 who made the journey. Another incident took place Monday night, in which 13 people died off the coast of Fuerteventura. The NGO Caminando Fronteras denounced "a humanitarian crisis".
A tally of the numbers of migrants who die or go missing during their journeys is impossible to establish definitively, since so many go without telling people, and travel via illegal means. Deaths at sea are even harder to trace, because many of the bodies are never recovered. The Atlantic Crossing from West Africa towards the Canaries is one of the worst routes for this.
Almost 2,100 migrants are estimated to have died trying to reach Spain by sea during the first half of 2021. The death toll is close to figures for the entire previous year, according to the non-governmental organization Caminando Fronteras.
The mother of Yamila, a five-year-old migrant girl who died late on June 29 aboard a helicopter of the Spanish army, is asking for help to travel to France from the Canary Islands to attend her daughter's funeral.
Spanish police have arrested two men suspected of "steering and navigating" a migrant boat that capsized last week off the Spanish Canary Islands archipelago. Four bodies were recovered following the accident.
Forty-five people, among them several children, were rescued on Sunday and brought to shore on Gran Canaria, the largest of Spain’s Canary Island archipelago in the Atlantic.
A 17-year old migrant girl from Ivory Coast met her Spanish rescuer in a BBC video last week. Aicha was one of three people to survive a 22-day crossing from Mauritania when she was found drifting at sea by the Spanish Air Force.
The Canary Islands – a tourist paradise if it weren't for the pandemic. But the islands have also been making headlines as more and more migrants arrived there. As camps and shelters were bursting at the seams and hotels were empty anyway because of the pandemic, the island's government requested to have vacation resorts take them in. That didn’t sit well with everyone.
The UN agencies UNHCR and IOM have spoken out against a steady increase in the number of migrants dying at sea after a boat was found near the Tenerife island with the corpses of 24 migrants onboard.
The migrants on the boat were all sub-Saharan Africans, rescue officials say. Three survivors have been transferred to a hospital on Tenerife.