In the same period, at least 161 people died trying to reach the Spanish coasts, with the latest three losing their lives at dawn on November 19 off Ceuta. Continued landings on the Spanish coast and overland via the Spanish enclaves in Morocco of Ceuta and Melilla confirm that the migration route of the western Mediterranean has regained popularity. The central and eastern Mediterranean routes have become less popular with migrants in this period.

Largest number of arrivals since 2006

Some NGOs involved in assisting refugees say that the new trend is due to the growing difficulty for sub-Saharan Africans to cross Libya and Niger to try to arrive on southern European coasts via North Africa. The number is the highest since 2006, when 31,678 undocumented migrants arrived in the Canary Islands archipelago and another 7,500 in southern Spain. Though more landings continue on the routes from Libya to Italy and from Turkey to Greece, both routes have seen a drop in arrivals. Some 114,606 migrants arrived on the Libya-Italy route from January until November 17, compared with the 167,828 in the previous year, a 31.7% drop, according to Italian interior ministry data. An even steeper decrease was seen for the Turkey-Greece route: from 170,679 migrants in 2016 to 25,614 this year until November 17. Of the migrants that have arrived in Spain this year, Moroccans account for 23.1%, followed by Algerians (20.9%) and those of sub-Saharan origins (Ivory Coast, Guinea, Cameroon, Mali and Nigeria), accounting for 55.8% of the total.

Algerian front opens

Spanish interior ministry sources quoted by Spanish media say that in the province of Murcia, some 519 Algerian migrants have landed on 49 boats that left from Morocco in the last week alone. This is unprecedented, said regional prefect Francisco Bernabé, calling it ''a coordinated attack on our borders''. In light of the recent wave of landings, Interior Minister Juan Ignacio Zoido publicly asked Algiers to step up monitoring of its coast and announced that he would be meeting this week with Algerian Ambassador to Spain Taoud Feroukhi to deal with the ''alarming wave of landings''. In the first two weeks of November, migrant landings occurred on the coasts of the Canary Islands as well, which had not been seen for years, with the arrival of three boats carrying 45 migrants from Mauritania and 47 from Senegal.