The other Spanish hotspot where border turmoil is playing out beside UK tourists ...Middle East

With rolling, golden sands and clear blue oceans, the Canary Islands are a renowned tourist destination.

Last year, 18.4 million people visited the islands, bringing in more than €23m (£19.6m) in revenue.

But beyond the tourist buzz is a starkly different reality. The Spanish archipelago is one of the world’s hotspots for irregular migration, with 17,788 people arriving by small boat last year.

Last week, more than 60,000 people crossed the sea border from Morocco into the Spanish territory of Ceuta, many of them swimming. European Commissioner Magnus Brunner said on Tuesday that the surge had been fuelled by criminal smuggling networks and disinformation on social media.

Before the mass crossing, the number of sea arrivals in Ceuta had stood at 2,826 for 2026 up to 15 July. The Canary Islands had had 4,400 arrivals by sea by the same date, according to UN data on what is known as the West Africa Atlantic route.

The Canaries are a common jumping-off point for those seeking to travel from the continent to Europe. Migrants arriving in Gran Canaria – predominantly from West Africa – have been pictured sleeping rough or in crowded reception centres not far from the hotels where tourists enjoy five-star stays.

In June, the Pope paid a two-day visit to the Canary Islands, which are situated off the northwest coast of Africa, calling for an “examination of conscience” on migration. He visited Gran Canaria’s Arguineguin fishing port, dubbed the “dock of shame” during the pandemic, when thousands of migrants camped out there with nowhere to go.

“Human dignity has no passport and does not lose its value when crossing a border,” Pope Leo said, adding that we “cannot grow accustomed to counting the dead”.

Today, Spanish authorities remove migrants swiftly from the islands. The number of crossings peaked in 2024, with more than 46,843 making the journey, often in wooden fishing boats. Numbers are falling, in part due to higher numbers of interceptions off the West African coast by EU naval patrols.

But hundreds of hungry migrants still regularly arrive in Arguineguin, in packed, unstable boats, desperate to seek out a new life in Europe. Many do not make it, with their bodies taken to morgues by Spanish health workers. Unmarked graves are common on the island. The lucky – but feeble – migrants who do make it are helped on to the dockside.

Arguineguin is just eight miles from Maspalomas, a tourist haven for British sunseekers all year round, where shorts and bikinis are de rigueur even in December. But these two worlds, if ever, rarely collide, said Calvin Lucock, a British former hotelier who worked in Gran Canaria who opened his home to migrants when the island’s hotels closed during the pandemic.

“These two places are very close but people do not see the migrants arriving. They may see them later when they start working in the hotels in Arguineguin or in Maspalomas,” he told The i Paper. “But isn’t that the same situation all over the world? How many Catalans do you see driving cabs in Barcelona or Londoners driving cabs in London?”

Many people make the journey to the Canary Islands from Morocco and the Western Sahara, but some travel from further south, in Mauritania and even Senegal and Gambia. When The i Paper visited in 2024, dock workers were busy sinking one of the boats as it was too filthy to be used.

One senior Spanish NGO worker said tourists do not see the migrants arriving, and that they are removed from the islands “sometimes within a week”.

This bizarre contrast is found in many tourist hotspots; the coastlines that make the locations so desirable for visitors also make the countries accessible for migrants seeking a new life in Europe.

Last year, Greece received nearly 38 million visitors, but it also saw the arrivals of more than 41,000 migrants by sea and 7,000 by land – with 107 people reported dead or missing while making the journey. There have already been 18,569 crossings this year.

In March, 22 migrants died off the Greek coast after spending six days in a dinghy. Two months later, hundreds of migrants were rescued south of the islands of Crete and Gavdos, with most reporting having left from Libya one or two days earlier.

During the Covid pandemic, mass evictions left many Greek refugees sleeping rough without access to shelter, protection or proper healthcare, according to Doctors Without Borders.

Emma Stevenson, Acting CEO at Choose Love, which supports search and rescue missions and humanitarian aid to asylum seekers, said that “the same glittering coasts which attract tourists each year to enjoy the sun, local areas and swim in the seas, are also locations in which people arrive every year after having taken dangerous and terrifying journeys in search of safety”.

The Greek island of Kos is a beloved holiday destination but also home to one of Greece’s 5 Closed Control Access Centres – a “prison-like centre with bars and fences which house displaced people arriving to the island, without shade, proper food or access to medical support”.

In Sicily, search and rescue crews saving lives from small boats are delayed or rejected from docking at the island, Stevenson said, as The i Paper found while embedded a rescue ship in the Meditarranean.

“These island locations thrive off tourism, while those who arrive escaping persecution and in need of compassion are often deterred through hostile policies or pushbacks,” Stevenson said, calling for safe routes for migrants to reach Europe.

Juliette Frontier, policy manager at Safe Passage International, said that the coastline was what united tourist and migration destinations. “For people fleeing persecution or conflict who may not have passports, visas or other documents needed to travel through regular routes, travelling by sea may sometimes present fewer formal barriers to reaching another country,” she said.

“Of course, this does not make the journey easier or safer as these journeys can be extremely dangerous and carry a very real risk to life. The same coastline can represent leisure and relaxation for tourists, while representing danger, exhaustion, uncertainty and even death for someone arriving irregularly and in search of safety.”

This can make emergency responses more difficult, Frontier said, with local organisations and communities finding themselves responding to people arriving with urgent and complex needs in places primarily set up for tourism.

In some areas which see large numbers of asylum seekers, local authorities are conducting “clean up” operations, like in Northern France, where there are daily evictions of camps and large rocks placed to prevent people from putting up shelters on waste land. “These coordinated policing efforts seek to render refugees invisible,” Frontier said.

The contrast between luxury tourism and dangerous small boat crossings “highlights the unequal reality of global mobility”, Frontier said.

“For many people, travel is straightforward, but for those from countries facing strict visa restrictions, lawful movement can be extremely difficult,” she said. “The contrast shows how where someone is born and the passport they hold can greatly affect their ability to travel safely and legally. While some people move freely, others face major legal and practical barriers even when fleeing persecution or conflict.”

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