Illegal immigrants from Africa arrive on the shores of Tenerife ragged and bleeding, lashed by the waves after days at sea pointing their small and battered craft at the distant peak of the Teide volcano, Spain’s highest mountain.
Yet whatever their physical state, they are usually full of joy: they have made it to Europe.
Lately, Africans have been turning up in Spain’s Canary islands archipelago at a rate of two to three boatloads a day.
The resort of Los Cristianos on the southern coast of Tenerife is a particularly popular destination.
”We don’t know why they choose Tenerife, or why the south coast, but the Teide (3 700m) can be seen from 50 or 60 nautical miles away, which makes it a good target,” said Luis Carillon, the local police chief.
They make the 1 000km crossing from Mauritania or Senegal in small fishing boats, and arrive ”with their flesh exposed by the salt spray and the rubbing of clothes, with sunstroke and light wounds that have usually become infected during the crossing, but they’re in the sunniest of moods,” according to Red Cross coordinator Austin Taylor.
Taylor received 137 migrants on Wednesday when Spanish coastguards guided their two boats into the Los Cristianos harbour.
European tourists crowded behind barriers set up by the police, eager to observe the arrivals.
One by one, the Africans stepped onto the quay before being taken, some staggering, others on stretchers, to three hospital tents set up by the Red Cross in conjunction with local authorities.
A dozen or so police officers watched the migrants on their way to the tents, but only the two men who had been steering the boats were detained for any length of time, on suspicion of people-trafficking.
Inside the tents, Red Cross volunteers wearing latex gloves handed each of the wraithlike migrants a bag with a change of clothes in it. The belongings they arrived with would be thrown away.
Sitting on the floor looking exhausted and vacant, the Africans underwent a medical examination. No-one needed to be hospitalised this time. ”We have had a few more serious hypothermia cases,” said Taylor, ”but mainly in January, during the winter”.
The migrants ”generally leave from Mauritania”, Carillon says, estimating that around 3 000 Africans have arrived in southern Tenerife so far this year. The total for the Canary islands archipelago as a whole stands at 7 500.
The single-coloured boats ”are generally Mauritanian, while the more colourful ones are Senegalese,” said Taylor, pointing at Wednesday’s two ships — one pale blue with patches of rust, the other striped white, red and yellow.
On board, the passengers constantly have to bail out the overloaded vessels.
But at the end of this arduous journey, a bus to a Spanish police station and then on to a reception centre awaits them. On Wednesday, some of of the arrivals even managed to smile through their exhaustion. Provided they do not come from a country with which Spain has a bilateral repatriation agreement — or that no-one can prove it if they do — they are most likely to be released after 40 days, somewhere on the Spanish mainland, armed with an expulsion order. – Sapa-AFP