Setting up the camp at the León school, in the neighborhood of El Lasso, in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.Quique Curbelo
A narrow path lined with eucalyptus trees leads to the old Las Raíces barracks in La Laguna, north of Tenerife.
Upon arrival, the ears are slightly plugged by the altitude, the temperature drops four degrees and the humidity envelops the clothes.
Around there are a handful of simple houses, with colored walls, and fields.
Much field.
In the background, the Tenerife North airport runway.
The noise of the excavators deafens everything.
Mud sticks to shoes.
In a few days, this abandoned barracks with one of its buildings in ruins will be one of the largest immigrant camps in Spain, with capacity for 1,500 people.
It will only be surpassed by the Las Canteras barracks, also in La Laguna, where warehouses and common showers are completed for up to 1,800 immigrants.
The migratory crisis in the Canary Islands, where 20,000 people have arrived so far this year in boats and cayucos, has overwhelmed the Administration.
After a year of rebounding arrivals, a pandemic and the limitations to execute expulsions, La Moncloa has finally assumed the situation in the Canary Islands as an emergency and now there is a race against the clock to solve it.
Time is ticking and arrivals continue.
After the dismantling of the makeshift camp on the Arguineguín pier, there are still almost 7,000 migrants in hotels that should be relocated in the coming weeks.
The Executive's refusal to facilitate large transfers of migrants to resources on the Peninsula has left few options, beyond concentrating those landed on the islands.
The Secretary of State for Migration has decided to create a model of temporary macrocamps in Gran Canaria, Tenerife and Fuerteventura, unprecedented in Spain.
Immigrants will reside in these places in an open regime.
They will be kept there pending a hypothetical expulsion.
The Las Raíces machines have been clearing brush at full speed for days, flattening the wet earth and paving three huge esplanades where tents and portable toilets will be installed.
The barracks already served as an emergency camp in the 2006 cayuco crisis, but then the tents were installed directly on the ground.
This time the landscape has been completely transformed.
Only a last-minute political unforeseen has slowed the hectic pace of work.
The City Council of La Laguna (governed by PSOE, United Can and Avante) paralyzed the works on Thursday while the corresponding urban procedures are being managed, but Migrations hopes to resume the bustle from sunrise to sunset as soon as possible.
The management of arrivals, with 14,000 landings in the last two months alone, has resulted in a collapse in reception and reception, a scene of chaos that has contributed to the speeches of the extreme right.
On the one hand, the lack of spaces for police custody led the Ministry of the Interior to crowd the new arrivals for almost four months in unsanitary conditions in the port of Arguineguín.
On the other hand, the Ministry of Inclusion, Social Security and Migrations stretched a precarious reception network - just 70 places a year ago - with hotel complexes emptied of tourists by the pandemic.
Months passed as suitable locations were mapped to serve thousands of newcomers by boat.
Licensing problems, the refusal of local authorities to welcome migrants in their municipalities and the resistance of the Ministry of Defense to give up its facilities aggravated the crisis.
The new camps will have some 7,000 beds installed in two barracks in Tenerife, another in Gran Canaria and a fourth in Lanzarote, all of them temporarily or indefinitely assigned by Defense.
The deployment is almost finished, in addition to a school in a disadvantaged neighborhood of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and in an office warehouse lent by Bankia.
There is still no definite date to occupy them, but the goal is to start in the next few days.
In the Canarias 50 regiment, in a polygon of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, an employee of Tragsa, the public company in charge of the works, runs from one end to the other glued to the telephone.
The contract requires you to lift everything, except unforeseen events, in 15 days, and there is no time to lose.
Everything had to be done and it has been necessary to clean, hire plumbers, electricians, receive the Red Cross tents at the port or arrange for normally competing demolition companies to work together.
The demolition of nine dilapidated warehouses will leave space for 14,000 square meters in an L shape.
In this emergency phase, which will cost at least 43 million euros financed with EU funds, the objective is to have everything ready as soon as possible.
Later we will study how to convert some of these accommodations into more comfortable and permanent spaces.
But, once the works are finished, there is an enormous challenge that is just as urgent: the management of these centers with so many people is unprecedented in Spain.
The only reception space with a similar volume is the Center for Temporary Stay for Immigrants (CETI) in Melilla, which, with a capacity for 780 people, has come to house more than 1,700 in the midst of the pandemic.
It is no coincidence that its director, the military on leave of absence Carlos Montero, with experience in the administration of the Army, has been chosen by Migrations to coordinate all this logistics on the islands.
The day-to-day running of these new centers involves organizing transportation, medical assistance, documentation, meals and a crowd.
The management of one part of the camps will fall to the Red Cross, which concentrates practically all humanitarian attention on the islands, and another, predictably, to the White Cross, an organization of Franciscans.
The novelty is in the possible entry as manager of the International Organization for Migration (IOM), whose role in Spain is limited to the organization of voluntary returns.
A team of technicians from Greece, where they do have experience in managing large accommodation, has visited the Tenerife barracks these days.
"Managing accommodation for 7,000 people with all the services they need is a tremendous challenge," assumes Montero.
"There is a lot of work to do".