The Spanish Coast Guard announced on Sunday March 7 that it had rescued 107 migrants this weekend on board boats off the coast of the Canaries.
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On Saturday alone, a boat carrying 15 men was found off the island of Tenerife and a second with 41 others, all from sub-Saharan Africa, near Gran Canaria.
On Sunday, an additional 51 people - 49 men and two women - were taken care of, off the same island, continued a spokesperson for the coast guard.
In 2020, 23,023 migrants arrived in the Canaries, eight times more than the 2,687 recorded the previous year, according to the Spanish Ministry of the Interior.
In January and February, they are a total of 2,341 to have landed in this archipelago, against 1,103 in the first two months of 2020, according to the same source.
From a hundred kilometers to the shortest between North-West Africa and the Canaries, this dangerous route due to strong currents is once again taken - often aboard overcrowded boats - by migrants, European agreements with Turkey, Libya and Morocco having reduced migratory flows in the Mediterranean.