1,300 migrants die trying to reach Spain in five months, report says

The sea between Africa and Spain kept taking lives even as fewer people tried to cross it. From January 1 to May 31, 1,317 migrants died or disappeared on routes toward Spain, including 142 women and 129 children, and 27 boats vanished with everyone on board.

Caminando Fronteras said the Atlantic route to the Canary Islands was the deadliest corridor, with 635 victims in the first five months of 2026. The toll came despite a 72% drop in arrivals, a stark sign that enforcement has not ended the crossing so much as made it more lethal for those who still attempt it. In 2025, the same group counted 3,090 deaths or disappearances at Spain’s borders, and it said the death rate worsened from around 14 for every 100 people who arrived that year to 21 for every 100 in 2026.

The geography helps explain why the numbers remain so high. The shortest stretch from the West African coast to the Canary Islands is about 100 kilometers, while the crossing from Morocco to Spain can narrow to about 20 kilometers. Yet both routes have become death traps because of overcrowded boats, rough seas, weak vessels and the difficulty of finding and rescuing craft that disappear far from shore. Rights groups say tighter controls in places such as Mauritania have pushed migrants onto longer and riskier paths across the Atlantic and the western Mediterranean, where smugglers can profit from desperation and where boats are more likely to vanish without a trace.

Spain’s border policy sits uneasily beside the scale of need. UNHCR said Spain granted international protection to 75,274 people in 2025 and received 144,396 asylum applications that year. More than 24,400 people arrived by land and sea in the first eight months of 2025, around half of them in the Canary Islands, even as arrivals fell 32% from the same period in 2024. Frontex said detections of irregular border crossings at the European Union’s external borders dropped 26% in 2025 to almost 178,000, the lowest level since 2021, but smuggling networks still shaped how routes shifted.

The crisis has taken on added moral force as Pope Leo XIV prepared to visit the Canary Islands, where local Catholic leaders have said he would draw attention to the treatment of migrants. He is expected to visit the Port of Arguineguín in Gran Canaria, which was dubbed the port of shame in 2020 after arrivals outpaced adequate facilities. The International Organization for Migration says nearly 8,000 migrants were reported dead or missing worldwide in 2025, and more than 82,000 since 2014, a measure of how many journeys end before shore is ever reached.