The Cabildo de El Hierro — the island council that governs the smallest inhabited island in the Canaries — has declared a migration emergency and asked higher authorities for help, after a week of arrivals with no recent parallel in the archipelago.
Since the first day of November, more than 3,300 people have come ashore on the island aboard about 30 boats, according to local authorities. For scale: El Hierro has just over 11,400 residents. In six days, the equivalent of nearly 30% of the island's population arrived.
The decree was signed by the council's president, Alpidio Armas, on Friday, November 6. On Saturday, November 7, he told Spanish television that the situation "has grown worse in recent days" and that the island "cannot face this alone". The emergency declaration, he explained, serves above all to create a formal framework for cooperation with the Canary Islands government and the Spanish state.
What the island is asking for
The request is not for money but for people and logistics. The council's decree asks for:
- staff and shift rotation so that workers from Salvamento Marítimo (the maritime rescue service), the Servicio Canario de la Salud (the Canary health service), the security forces, the Red Cross and NGOs can rest;
- coordinated transfers of those arriving to islands with more reception capacity;
- reinforcement of first-reception facilities, to relieve the temporary reception centre for foreigners in San Andrés;
- attention to the needs of La Restinga, the harbour village where the boats dock — its residents, its businesses and its fishing and diving sectors.
Armas described conditions at the island's hospital as "undesirable". Buses have been diverted to the migration operation and health workers brought in from other islands.
Fernando Clavijo, the president of the regional government, had said on Friday that the situation is "absolutely unsustainable" and that the pace of arrivals is approaching the 2024 record — on some days, above it.
The longest and deadliest route
The Atlantic route from West Africa to the Canaries is one of the world's deadliest migration crossings. Salvamento Marítimo rescued 3,261 people in the archipelago's waters in the first six days of November. In recent weeks at least nine people have died near the islands; this week two bodies were found on a boat bound for the Canaries and five more people are believed to have died during the voyage, according to survivor accounts gathered by AFP.
The annual figure, though, had been falling. After a record of more than 46,000 arrivals in 2024, tighter surveillance and cooperation with countries of origin and transit brought the flow down: between January and October this year, 13,327 people reached Spain by sea irregularly, 5.5% fewer than in the same period last year, according to Spain's Interior Ministry.
The explanation for November's spike, then, lies not in the overall volume but in geography. Patrols off Senegal, Mauritania and Morocco have pushed departures further south — to The Gambia, Guinea-Bissau and Guinea — which lengthens the crossing and sends the boats ashore precisely at El Hierro, the westernmost and southernmost island in the archipelago. On Saturday, Senegalese police said they had intercepted 142 people, among them women and young children, off Dakar.
With information from RTVC, El Hierro Hoy, Al Jazeera, AFP and Reuters.
