EL HIERRO, Spain (Reuters) – Two boats loaded with migrants reached the Canary Islands late on Sunday as rescuers kept searching for 48 missing from an earlier sea wreck that may be the deadliest such accident for 30 years in the Spanish archipelago.
A makeshift vessel carrying 81 migrants reached Tenerife, the Canaries’ largest island, emergency services said on Sunday evening. At least one of the migrants required hospitalisation.
Another migrant boat reached the second largest Canary island, Fuerteventura. The emergency services did not specify the number of migrants on that boat. A third boat containing some 80 migrants was nearing the smallest island of El Hierro.
The two crossings followed a disastrous sinking of a migrant boat at the weekend that killed at least nine people and left at least 48 missing, including one under 18 years old, rescue services said. Rescuers were able to pick up 27 of 84 migrants who were trying to reach Spanish shores from West Africa.
The disaster prompted Fernando Clavijo, the Canary Islands’ regional president, to call for mainland Spain and the European Union to act to ease a crisis in which migrant crossings from West Africa to the archipelago have soared by 85% this year.
“This situation sadly should push us all to immediately and urgently seek an agreement that allows us to deal with this phenomenon,” Clavijo told reporters.
The number of migrants crossing from West Africa to the Canary Islands, a perilous journey that can be as long as 800 miles (1,300 km), rose between Jan. 1 and Sept. 15 to 26,758, interior ministry data show. Meanwhile, the migrant flow from North Africa along routes in the central and western Mediterranean ebbed, EU Frontex border agency figures indicate.
Calm seas and gentle winds associated with late summer in the Atlantic Ocean off West Africa have prompted a renewed surge of migrants, local authorities said this month.
Earlier this year, Clavijo said his teams expected 70,000 migrants to reach the Spanish archipelago by year end, almost a two-fold rise versus 2023 record arrivals of 39,910.
The rising number of migrants, driven by extreme poverty and political instability in Africa’s Sahel region, is causing political tension in Spain where mainland regions have resisted calls to take in migrants from the Canary Islands.
In the roughly 30 years of migrant crossings from West Africa to the Canaries, the deadliest recorded shipwreck occurred in 2009 off the island of Lanzarote when 25 people died.
(Reporting by Borja Suarez, Inti Landauro, Emma Pinedo and Graham Keeley; editing by Mark Heinrich)
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