Canary Islands increasingly popular route to Spain
Arriving Africans recall the horrors of their sea voyage. Corina Pons reports from Gran Canaria.
STANDING in a cemetery of abandoned boats, Mohamed Fane picks a West African franc off the floor and shudders at the traumatic memory of his voyage from Senegal to the Canary Islands.
After an arduous overland trip and months waiting, smugglers shepherded the 33yearold carpenter into a flimsy wooden vessel with two dozen others to sail from the Moroccan town of Dakhla, but it ran out of fuel far from the Spanish archipelago.
One man died on board, while a Spanish rescue boat saved the rest.
Fane, who barely ate in three days at sea and used his water bottle to bail out the leaking boat, wept like never before when he reached Gran Canaria.
‘‘It is the hardest thing that ever happened to me. I would never repeat it,’’ he said.
Such horrendous experiences are commonplace on one of the busiest and most perilous routes into Europe for Africans fleeing poverty, conflict and hunger accentuated by the Covid19 pandemic and the knockon effect of the Ukraine war.
Twothirds of African migrants entering Spain now go via the Canaries, according to government data. Some 9589 have made it there so far in 2022 — a 27% rise on the same period last year.
On a map, the seven islands are just pinpricks in the vast Atlantic off West Africa. Fishermen guide the precarious boats with often inadequate motors. Many get lost or sink.
At least 1000 people have died in those waters so far this year, according to the Walking Borders charity, with the tens of thousands of European tourists flocking to the Canaries largely unaware of the tragedies unfolding so near their holidays.
‘‘There is panic among people in Africa after the pandemic, the war in Ukraine and the inflation, because they are very dependent on food from outside,’’ Sukeina Ndiaye, a leader of a migrant support network on Tenerife island, said.
‘‘I fear many more are going to take the risk.’’ — Reuters