The Puerto Calma hotel, a complex with sea views in the south of Gran Canaria, should be empty.
English tourists, their regular customers, are still unable to travel and the time is gone when tourist accommodation was filled with hundreds of people arriving on the island by boat.
Their irremediable destiny, as the macrocamps for immigrants were opened, was to languish like dozens of ghost complexes in the region.
But as night falls, a handful of lights go on.
Puerto Calma, in reality, never closed its doors.
It's breakfast time and Sulaiman, a tall, thin young man who fled Sierra Leone, dumps a fruit salad on plates, hands out buttered loaves of bread, and makes sure there are enough glasses for coffee.
The dining room tables are beginning to fill with Senegalese, Gambians, Mauritanians and Moroccans, a total of 52 migrants who were left out of the reception system and who, in many cases, spent days and weeks sleeping on the street.
Until they ended up here.
"We had the hotel empty, we had to do something," maintains Calvin Lucock, Canary Islands director of the company that owns the venue.
His wife, the Norwegian Unn Tove Saetran, partner and owner of three restaurants in the area agrees: “We believe there is another way of doing things.
There cannot be so many people on the street ”.
The couple, who opened the hotel for migrants in September with the aim of saving the company's numbers, now welcome, on their own and out of pocket, a part of their former guests.
Lucock and Saetran, who only rented the space and had no responsibility for the reception, had already been involved from day one in making life easier for their tenants.
They collected clothes, arranged trips to the Moroccan consulate, and put their lawyer through asylum applications.
"Opening our hotels to migrants revolutionized our life," they told EL PAÍS in February.
Just a month ago, they took another step.
They found that many of their guests, with whom they already shared a part of their lives, ended up sleeping in the street after refusing to go to Tenerife, where the Las Raices macrocamp is located, the same one that has made headlines for weeks due to the cold and the lack of food.
"The first thing I thought when I saw my name on the list to go to the camp was that they were going to deport me," recalls Cheikh Mbacke, a 27-year-old Mauritanian with Senegalese nationality.
Mbacke spent 15 days sleeping in the open until one day he saw the lights in his old hotel on and sat in the doorway to wait for Lucock and Saetran.
“I asked them to come back and they reassured me.
They did not know for how long, but they told me that as long as possible they would take me in. "
But the former tenants of Puerto Calma were only part of the hundreds of migrants who have been left homeless in recent months.
They are, above all, Senegalese and Moroccans who, blocked on the islands, escape the poor conditions of the camps and expulsion, although being on the street makes them a target of the police.
A group of neighbors ended up creating the Somos Red association to help them, but the work is enormous.
Within days, after accommodating guests they already knew, the couple began welcoming people from other resorts who fled or were evicted.
Yousseff Arrach, a 37-year-old Moroccan, who wanders silently through the hotel, was one of them.
He, expelled from a hotel in Arguineguín for having drunk alcohol, was one of the first evicted from the system, when there were still a few dozen homeless migrants.
Arracha spent three months out in the open, rummaging through containers to eat, and for a time wanted to return to Morocco.
"I was tired of living in such misery," he says.
The couple intends to help him get his documentation so that, one day, when the blockade of migrants in ports and airports is loosened, he can travel to Valencia to meet his sister.
He is also helping out with asylum applications from his guests.
Everyone knows that the time will come when Puerto Calma will once again be a vacation destination, another thing is what will happen next.
“I don't know anything about my future.
It all depends on Unn, ”says Ousmane Ndiaye, a short 19-year-old Senegalese, who came in the boat with his three little brothers who live in a reception center for minors.
The woman looks at him and playfully tossing the sleeve of a sweater at him, promises: "We will find a solution."
From hoteliers to patrons of their own foundation
Since Calvin Lucock and Unn Tove Saetran got involved in serving the migrants who passed through two of their hotels, their lives turned upside down. They went from seeing the arrival of boats on television to having in front of mothers with recently disembarked babies, minors who the authorities considered adults, to traumatized young people ... "We learned a lot in those days of how individual attention is necessary, of the importance of that they are treated as people and not as numbers ”, maintains Saetran. Already then they began to wonder how they could continue to be involved in the reception of migrants and created Fundación Canaria Mama Africa with their own capital. With it, they intend, on the one hand, to participate in the humanitarian reception network and they are thinking of setting up one of its hotels, but also of caring for minors alone, an issue that has overwhelmed the Government of the Canary Islands. The couple rejects the large centers that have had to be opened on the islands due to the emergency and offers three houses where they could house small groups of young people with the aim of training and preparing them for their coming of age. "We have to focus on their education, provide them with psychological assistance, learn the language and a profession," they defend.
