/ 1 August 2006

Tenerife tourists rescue African migrants

0.Tourists sunning themselves in the Canary Islands came to the rescue of 88 immigrants from Africa whose canoe-shaped fishing boat grounded on a beach in Tenerife. They were given first aid by holidaymakers and locals who took some of the most severely dehydrated to hospitals near the town of Granadilla in their cars.

”It was totally spontaneous,” a local police officer, Javier Melián, told El País newspaper on Monday. ”Every immigrant must have had four or five people looking after them. The beach was full of tourists.”

Foreign sunbathers, especially Germans, were among those who helped while Red Cross units and the local police made their way to the beach on the southern coast of Tenerife.

The tourists helped the immigrants wade through the last few metres of water on to the beach, gave them water to drink, dry clothes and held towels over them to keep them in the shade.

Several children were among those who had to be looked after until the Red Cross arrived.

”We handed out surgical gloves to people in case the immigrants had illnesses, but they didn’t really care about that,” Melián said. ”I was especially impressed by the young people, who gave them their things and helped, even though they could not understand a word they said.”

The sight of desperate developing world immigrants turning up on the beaches where Europeans routinely visit to sunbathe is becoming increasingly common in the Canary Islands. Spain says about 11 000 people, mainly sub-Saharan Africans, have arrived in the Canary Islands so far this year.

Hundreds of people are thought to have died on the perilous crossing since new routes from distant Mauritania and Senegal opened up at the end of last year.

Last week alone four dead immigrants were found in two of the vessels that reached the islands, which lie in the Atlantic some 160km off north-west Africa.

Other vessels, usually carrying between 50 and 100 people, are believed to have sunk without trace on the voyage north along the coast of Africa and west to the Canary Islands.

One boat that got lost was eventually washed up, four months later, on the shores of Barbados, on the other side of the Atlantic. Eleven petrified corpses of would-be immigrants, thought to be from Senegal, were found on board.

The flow of African fishing boats carrying immigrants to the Canary Islands continued on Monday with two more arriving in Tenerife with 160 people. One of the vessels, with 84 people on board, was already half-sunk when Spanish rescue services reached it. About 200 immigrants reached the island on Sunday.

The European Union has pledged to help control the flow of immigrants, sending patrol boats and spotter planes to the Canary Islands.

The Africans are, however, only a tiny proportion of the total number of immigrants coming to Spain.

Last year about 650 000 foreigners travelled to Spain, whose booming economy needs manual labourers. Most were Latin Americans who arrived on tourist visas and then stayed.

A further 650 00 were given residency permits last year as the government called an amnesty for illegal immigrants with job contracts. – Guardian Unlimited Â