The disproportionality of the Atlantic Route is once again drowning the island of El Hierro - a small point in the immensity of the Atlantic with 12,040 registered inhabitants - with the disembarkation of more than 1,300 migrants in the last weekend, almost 2,000 if counted since last Wednesday.
"It is absolutely unsustainable," the regional president Fernando Clavijo warned last Friday, when the 30 canoes - which transported more than 4,500 people in November, according to data from the El Cabildo - began to pile up at the La Restinga dock. Over the past weekend, these physical testimonies, discolored by the salt from eight days on the high seas, of the migratory crisis have been removed and transferred to the La Frontera clean point for scrapping.
Each cayuco brings with it the defeat of two shores. The failure of an Africa that continues without offering horizons to a large part of its young people and that of a Europe that, more than three decades later, has still not found a response capable of containing the phenomenon. "Urgent measures are urgently needed," Clavijo reproached the fragility of an archipelago - and, above all, the island of El Hierro - which is once again the epicenter of a route that continues to push thousands of lives towards Europe.
It all began, at least symbolically, on August 28, 1994, when two young Sahrawi fishermen, Baijea (24 years old) and Bachi (22), reached the beach of Las Salinas (Fuerteventura) guided by the light of the La Entallada lighthouse. It was difficult to imagine that that arrival would be the first chapter of a story of future proportions so difficult to anticipate. Since then and 22 years later, 270,218 people in an irregular situation have arrived by sea to the Canary Islands - more than half of them (142,539) between 2021 and 2025 -, according to the report Demographics of the Canary Islands, Ceuta and Melilla: the porous southern border of Spain, prepared by the Center for Studies, Training and Social Analysis of the CEU San Pablo University Foundation based on data from the INE, Eurostat, the ministries of the Interior and Health and the United Nations, among other official sources.
A decade later, the rudimentary fishing boats that began to venture from the coasts of Senegal, Gambia and Mauritania caused the term cayuco to begin to make its way into the daily speech of the Spanish. In 2006, the archipelago witnessed one of the greatest expressions of that collective flight. The lack of future, hunger and poverty pushed tens of thousands of people to enter the ocean, on journeys of shocking fragility, while the Atlantic claimed an impossible to determine number of lives. That year, 31,678 migrants arrived in the Canary Islands. The magnitude of the so-called cayucos crisis forced the deployment of an unprecedented diplomatic, police and economic response: the Frontex operation Hera, the bilateral repatriation agreements with the African countries of departure and the Africa Plan, with which Spain multiplied the cooperation funds destined for sub-Saharan Africa. However, after the pandemic the numbers rebounded and, in 2024, 46,843 people arrived in the Canary Islands (17% of them, 7,963, arrived on the island of El Hierro with 11,806 inhabitants registered at that time).
Migration management continues to constitute, as the Canary Islands Minister of Social Welfare, Equality, Youth, Children and Families, Candelaria Delgado, stated in December 2025, "the greatest humanitarian, legal and political challenge" that this autonomous community faces. A structural crisis for which the Government of the Canary Islands allocated 190 million euros that year (of which 155.1 million are dedicated to the care of unaccompanied minors) and denounced it as "unsustainable without a solidarity response from the country as a whole."
This year's numbers already anticipated that history could repeat itself. The approximately 7,300 arrivals recorded in 2026 in El Hierro before the last episode warned that the previous balance could be exceeded. The landings of recent days have ended up confirming that forecast. In October alone, 2,776 people arrived on the island - 72.8% of the 3,814 total entries to the Canary Islands -, while in the first eight days of November 4,500 arrivals have been recorded. The pressure on health, emergency and reception services has reached extraordinary levels in a territory that, due to its size and population, can hardly absorb such a concentration of arrivals for a long time.
The emergency has forced the reactivation of evacuation and referral mechanisms to other islands. The Temporary Care Center for Foreigners (CATE) of San Andrés, with 390 people, and the old convent managed by the Red Cross, where another 81 remained housed, are facing an occupation that has forced the Government Delegation to charter special ferries from the port of La Estaca to Tenerife and Gran Canaria. The Government of Spain also ordered on Sunday afternoon the mobilization of two Airbus A330 planes from the Gando air base (Gran Canaria) and the Reina Sofía airport (Tenerife South) to transport nearly 500 recently arrived migrants to the Peninsula.
