At the end of last week, the Spanish Canary Islands of Lanzarote, Fuerteventura, El Hierro and Tenerife experienced the arrival of more than 900 migrants over 24 hours. This week arrivals continued. In figures updated by the UN Refugee Agency UNHCR on October 8, almost 19,000 migrants had reached the Canary Islands since the beginning of January.

In the week of October 2-8, 3,565 migrants reached the islands.

Read more: Canary Islands: Tensions rise over increase in migrant arrivals

 "Of course, these arrivals are not quite normal," said Iñigo Vila, the head of the Red Cross' emergency unit in El Hierro. Yet far from being alarmist, he relativized the situation. "When we saw thousands of people sleeping outdoors in Gran Canaria in 2021 and our reception and transfer capacities were saturated, that was a humanitarian crisis. Today, I wouldn't talk about a crisis."

Certainly, over the past few days, "arrivals have been increasing and we're working hard, but we still have sufficient capacity" to receive people, added Vila.

Arrivals are concentrated in the western part of the archipelago

The Red Cross is the only NGO present at the ports of arrival. This arrangement was agreed with the ministries in charge of migration issues, and especially the Interior Ministry. "We do a medical check-up to make sure the migrants arrived in good condition", and their basic needs are met, said Vila.

People who disembark "are exhausted and some are dehydrated", he added. This is especially true of those who set out from Senegal and had been at sea for "five to eight days." Even so, "very few are transferred to hospitals for in-depth treatment: generally, their physical condition is fine," said the Red Cross spokesman. 

Read more: Survivors of Cape Verde shipwreck brought home to Senegal

In recent years, boat arrivals "have been more concentrated in the eastern part of the Canaries, near the African coast," on the islands of Lanzarote and Fuerteventura. In recent months, "particularly since July, they have been concentrated more to the west of the archipelago," said Vila, meaning that El Hierro, the westernmost island, and Tenerife have seen the greatest number of arrivals. 

El Hierro: a single emergency shelter and 'no other option'

Over 1,200 migrants landed on El Hierro in the week leading up to October 8. Yet on this tiny island of less than 300 square kilometers and home to some 11,000 inhabitants, there is only "one emergency shelter, where people wait a few hours before being transferred. There is no other option", said Vila.

Read more: Boat crammed with 280 migrants reaches Spain's Canary Islands

The lack of space makes "it therefore difficult to increase the capacity" of the reception facilities, noted the Red Cross spokesman. Instead, authorities strive to transfer the exiles as soon as possible to the larger islands, like Tenerife, the nearest island, or Gran Canaria, which are better equipped to handle the arrivals.

Faced with the increase in arrivals on El Hierro, the authorities have made several transfers to the larger Canary Islands, reported the French news agency Agence France Presse (AFP).

The Red Cross spokesman said these transfers generally take place within a few hours. Many migrants spend "just six hours in El Hierro, before boarding a ferry or commercial vessel" bound for the main islands, he added.

'Speeding up transfers' to mainland Spain

Other NGOs are taking over reception facilities on the larger islands. The Spanish police register the arrivals and from there, new transfers are made to mainland Spain.

Several dozen migrants slept outside on blankets and thin mattresses in the port of Los Cristianos in Tenerife while awaiting their transfer, as seen in photographs taken on October 7 and published by the EFE Canarias news agency.

When asked whether this was a sign of the larger islands being saturated, Vila put the situation into context. There was a "temporary coordination problem" in the handling of arrivals, but it didn’t represent a "collapse of the reception system" on the island.

Read more: Canary Islands: Migrants turn to hunger strikes, self-harm

Whether social services can keep up with the arrivals depends on whether the migrants continue arriving at the same pace. "We are approaching the limits of capacity" on Tenerife and Gran Canaria, admitted Vila.

"If we continue at this rate for several months, even the large islands will suffer from overcrowding," he said. "At that point, we will have to speed up transfers to mainland Spain".

Migratory patterns which are hard to predict

In recent years, the migration route to the Canary Islands has been particularly busy due to tighter controls in the Mediterranean. Many boats set off from Morocco and Senegal. According to the latest figures from the Spanish Ministry of the Interior, the Canary Islands saw the arrival of almost 15,000 migrants between January 1 and September 30, an increase of almost 20% over the same period in 2022.

Read more: Canary Islands: 518 migrants rescued after crossing the Atlantic

Yet changes in the numbers of arrivals are difficult to predict. "You can have an intense week like this one, then no arrivals for one or more days because of bad weather conditions...", said the Red Cross spokesman.

It's also difficult to predict which routes will be taken in the future. "In the last few days, the arrivals have been concentrated on El Hierro and Tenerife, but suddenly they stopped, and we had arrivals in Fuerteventura and Lanzarote... Then the situation changed yet again," he concluded.