“We can’t go on like this. We are only 30 doctors in all and over 20,000 migrants arrived on the island in 2024. It’s a disaster, and it will get worse and worse.” Ana Torres is a doctor in El Hierro’s only hospital. Today she is particularly disconsolate, because the smallest and most remote of the Canary Islands, a Unesco biosphere reserve since 2000 and famous for having achieved energy self-sufficiency, now has to deal with a new emergency: that of refugees and migrants.
El Hierro – politically European but geographically in Africa – has become the Lampedusa of the Atlantic, the new gateway to the EU for those arriving from Africa. “I love my job,” continues Torres, who has worked here since 2010 and has family in Gran Canaria, “but it is frustrating to know that you cannot do it well. This constant flow of migrants takes up a good part of our time to the detriment of the needs of the island’s citizens, which is why we need another hospital quickly.”
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San Andrés is home to the CATE, Centro Móvil de Atención Temporal de Extranjeros (Mobile Centre for Temporary Reception of Foreign Nationals), run by the national police and co-financed by the EU
Migrants and refugees disembark in their hundreds almost every day, after perilous journeys that can last up to 10 days in the waves and wind of the Atlantic. They arrive in small wooden or fibreglass boats, set sail from ports in Mauritania, Senegal and the Gambia.
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Clockwise from top left: migrants who arrived by boat on the island of El Hierro from the African coast are taken by police to a refugee centre in the north of the island of Tenerife; onboard the ferry to Tenerife; a group of migrants from Mali, Senegal and the Gambia walk to the natural pools of La Maceta; in Valverde four people outside a refugee centre
Initially it was only men. Now women and children also arrive, and as Sofía Hernández, head of the Rescue Coordination Centre in Las Palmas, recounted, “there is also a hierarchy in the phenomenon of migration because if the Moroccans arrive in the biggest boats, it is the sub-Saharans who cram the smallest and most dangerous boats”.
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Above: in the port of La Restinga, workers move a boat carrying people from Africa and now destined to be destroyed. Left: boats are piled up in the grounds of the company Condaca Canarias SL, ready to be destroyed and disposed of
The most frequent landing point in El Hierro is the southern tip of La Restinga, where the boats are piled up every day in the harbour and then destroyed. Sebastian Florido works here, at the shipyard crane. “Today three boats arrived,” he recounts on a windy day in December 2024, “and there were almost 100 people on board in all, including five bodies. But I remember well that in March this year, 1,100 people arrived in a single day, and among them were also Syrians, Bengalis and Pakistanis.”
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Omar Kebbeh, 18, a Gambian, landed on the island on 26 August 2023 onboard a boat with 125 other people, after a journey that started from Senegal and lasted six days. Today Omar has been adopted by a family on the island and the teenager, who wants to be an electrician, would like to stay
“The numbers are increasing year after year, and unfortunately so are the fatal shipwrecks,” says Francis Mendoza, a local civil defence volunteer along with 62 other fellow citizens of El Hierro. “Migration to these latitudes increased massively after the Covid-19 epidemic, when increased border controls on the Mediterranean reactivated the Canary route and shifted the migratory balance.” Just to give an idea, last year there were about 47,000 migrants coming from the west African coast and heading for the Canaries (an 18% increase over the previous year) and almost half of them landed in El Hierro, where controls are less stringent.
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Mustafa Ndiaye, right, and his friend Karim, both 16 and from Senegal, around the town of Valverde. They have been housed for about three months in the Valverde juvenile reception centre
The journey is very risky, there can be engine failures or food and water shortages. “Those who arrive alive often have serious flu, dehydration, hypothermia,” says Inmaculada Mora Peces, emergency doctor at the hospital in El Hierro. “Many drink sea water and go mad, and for this reason they are tied up or at worst left to die at sea, while others have the so-called trench foot, a problem that occurred in the past in trench wars and is due in this case to the persistent presence of the feet on the bottom of the boat, for days on end, amid salt water, diesel and urine.”
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A road crosses the northern valley of El Golfo, a large, particularly fertile semicircular depression that is home to the island’s largest banana and pineapple plantations
Ten years ago, El Hierro earned headlines in a different way: the volcanic island – 20 km (12 miles) wide, with a total surface area of 268 sq km and inhabited by 11,000 people (many are former emigrants who have returned from Venezuela) – decided to start producing clean energy through renewable sources such as water and wind, achieving energy independence for at least half the year and avoiding the equivalent of 18,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions each year.
It was a worldwide success and everyone talked about it. ‘“On the island you can recharge your electric car for free and in a couple of years we will finally start using solar energy,” says Cristina Morales Clavijo of the Gorona del Viento power station.
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Above: on the outskirts of Valverde stand the five wind turbines that are part of the El Hierro wind-hydro power station, a project that contributes to making the island energy self-sufficient for at least half of the year
In antiquity, El Hierro was considered the border of the known world, the frontier for the brave navigators who challenged the Atlantic. Today, the island has once again become an important border, a border coveted by African migrants and refugees. And so the landings emergency has become a dramatic phenomenon in recent years, affecting the entire Canary Islands archipelago and for which no one – Frontex, Policia Nacional, Red Cross, Civil Defence, NGOs – has a solution.
One, however, is suggested by 18-year-old Omar Kebbeh, from the Gambia, who landed in El Hierro on the morning of 26 August 2023 and stayed on the island. Sitting in a bar in Frontera, wearing a Barcelona shirt and after a chat with some friends of his age, he says: “The west must at the same time offer training and a job to those who arrive but also convince other Africans not to leave. Africa must be really helped, serious investments and real development policies are needed, otherwise migration will never end.”
