Uncaging the Canary Islands

The Atlantic route to the Canary Islands, one of the world’s deadliest migration paths, has seen a dramatic surge in arrivals since 2020. NGO Caminando Frontera reports that the route claimed nearly 10,000 victims in 2024, with some boats drifting as far as 6,000 km to Central and South America. Initial responses to the increase in arrivals to the islands focused on migrants’ prolonged containment. Frustration over stalled transfers spread among migrants and locals, together with widespread fear of the archipelago being turned into an open-air prison.

Graffiti on wall outside Las Raices camp, San Cristobal de La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain. Image courtesy of author taken on 18 May 2023

Fears of the islands becoming a site of incarceration – as illustrated by the above canary cage graffiti – are understandable considering the broader European borderscape. Mediterranean islands such as Lampedusa and Lesbos have become synonymous with prolonged retention under the EU’s Hotspot approach. And the EU’s recently adopted screening regulation within the Pact on Migration and Asylum protracts border detention practices.

Yet, does the bird cage metaphor hold true for the Canary Islands? Fieldwork conducted in 2023-2024 suggests otherwise. Despite record arrivals over the past two years, Spain’s migration policies prioritize rapid transfers to the mainland, reshaping the Canary Islands as hubs of identification, categorization and transfer to the mainland – an evident departure from the EU’s prevailing logic of border management.

The Canary-Islands bridge

While renowned as a top tourist destination, the Canary Islands are also a strategic node of the EU’s Atlantic Ocean border control and migration management. Situated 1,500 km from the Spanish peninsula and less than 100 km from Morocco, they act as a bridge between three continents. As one research partner put it during my 2023 ethnographic fieldwork in Tenerife, ‘Here, we often say that the Canary Islands have their head in Europe, their heart in Latin America and their feet in Africa.’1 The Canary Islands are the outermost region of the Schengen area and, therefore, the most critical southernmost border of the EU.

While the first migrant sea crossing to the Canaries took place 30 years ago, it wasn’t until the early 2000s that the passage became newsworthy. From the outset Spain tried to prevent confinement on the islands. Due to the lack of reception infrastructure on the archipelago, newly arrived people who could not be deported were released from detention with an unenforceable expulsion order and informally transferred to the mainland. According to NGO SOS-Racismo, some 10,000 people were relocated from the Canaries to the Spanish mainland between 2002 and 2003. Initially informal and discreet, these transfers were formalized in 2005 under the Plan Caldera, making territorial redistribution an official policy.

When arrivals increased in 2006 to 31,678 people during what has been called the ‘cayuco crisis’,2 Spain implemented a series of policies that simultaneously addressed the departure of African migrants and managed their arrival. The Spanish government agreed a series of plans with West African countries to intercept migrants using joint surveillance operations, and to discourage their departure through development aid and cooperation. The government also sought the EU’s assistance under the newly created European Border and Coast Guard Agency. Frontex, as the agency is commonly known, launched operation HERA that same year: its first and longest mission, patrolling African coasts and supporting Spanish authorities during identification procedures in the Canaries. Such practices would later inform the European approach in the Mediterranean.

Concurrently, the Spanish government introduced the Humanitarian Assistance programme to deal with the situation migrants found themselves in after their release from detention centres. It regulated grants to entities to develop services focused on emergency socio-healthcare, reception, transfer and other necessary support services. An interview with a Red Cross employee revealed that the organization was the sole subcontracted entity implementing the programme in the archipelago and remained the only provider until 2019. Between 2007 and 2009, the only service offered was transfer to the mainland after migrants were released from detention. And it wasn’t until 2010 that the first reception centre, with capacity for 8 people, was established in Tenerife.3 That same year, deterrent measures at sea and in West Africa produced their desired effect and arrivals dramatically decreased, with less than 200 people reaching the Canary Islands. As a result, the archipelago lost relevance as an arrival point for almost a decade – a period in which migratory journeys redirected towards the central Mediterranean.

A cage in construction

Stringent border control measures in the Mediterranean4 saw resurgent migration to the Canary Islands: in 2020 arrivals increased by a staggering 756.50% compared to 2019. The sudden influx revealed the archipelago’s lack of preparation. Without established reception facilities, the initial response was makeshift and chaotic: migrants were detained for prolonged period of time on docks in crowded, improvized shelters under precarious conditions.

As this surge happened at the same time as the COVID-19 pandemic, a decision was made to repurpose empty hotels as temporary reception facilities. However, the pandemic was also a tool for confining migrants to the islands. Official transfers to the mainland were severely insufficient. National police officers stationed at ports and airports even prevented the movement of newly arrived migrants with valid travel documents, justifying the restriction on public health concerns.

By late 2020 the government had rolled out Plan Canarias, leading to the construction of seven large-scale reception facilities scattered across Tenerife, Gran Canaria and Fuerteventura, relinquishing hotels of their improvized role. The two largest centres, Las Canteras and Las Raíces, both located in northern Tenerife, housed 1,800 and 1,450 migrants respectively. While these facilities provided alternative spaces for migrants, they also signalled a shift in containment practices, from chaotic public visibility on docks and hotels to secluded institutionalized settings.

Las Canteras Camp. Image courtesy of the author taken 31 October 2023

Prolonged retainment in extremely poor conditions within these camps, coupled with the lack of a sufficient transfer mechanism to the mainland, soon drew widespread condemnation.  Reports from NGOs, human rights groups and the Spanish Ombudsman painted a grim picture of overcrowding, inadequate sanitation, limited access to essential services and rights violations. Comparisons to the then infamous Lampedusa and Lesvos camps quickly emerged from organizations such as the Spanish Commission for Refugee Aid (CEAR) and Doctors of the World.

Frustrated by their confinement and poor conditions, migrants began to voice dissent. Many left Las Raíces to create a makeshift camp supported by local civil society groups. As an activist recalls, the makeshift camp ‘was called the camp of dignity, in comparison to the camp of shame’.5 Graffiti such as that of the canary cage appeared at this time conveying anger, despair and defiance. Such artistic expressions captured the collective sentiment of immobility and abandonment, resonating with broader fears that the Canary Islands were becoming Europe’s latest border prison.

The cage graffiti gained traction. State Watch published analysis, employing the same imagery, framed Spain’s actions as aligning with EU policies, which had transformed other border islands into detention spaces. The investigative team argued that the Canary Islands were not an exception but the replication of a systematic EU strategy of containment aimed at deportation.

However, the situation in the Canaries deserves a more nuanced interpretation. Merging crises – the rapid increase in arrivals alongside a global health emergency – shaped the measures implemented there during 2020 and 2021. Rather than reflecting a deliberate strategy to transform the islands into a detention zone, these policies seemed reactionary and temporary.

Beyond the cage

When I arrived in Tenerife for my first fieldwork visit in August 2023, I anticipated overcrowding due to the upsurge in arrivals, which reached nearly 40,000 by the end of the year. While I knew that airport interception operations had ceased post-pandemic, individual transfers to the mainland still required financial means, knowledge of administrative procedures and documentation – resources that are often unavailable to many migrants.

However, when visiting Las Raíces and Las Canteras camps, I witnessed a surprise scenario. Reception facilities had expanded: Las Raíces and Las Canteras now host up to 5,000 people.6 New centres structured around vulnerability criteria had also been established: for example, the Red Cross-run centre in Santa Cruz de Tenerife serving vulnerable groups like families and women had opened in 2021. New typologies of centres had been introduced to evaluate vulnerabilities and direct individuals to appropriate facilities. In 2023 two new Assistance and Referral Centres (CAEDs) were introduced by the Red Cross in the province of Santa Cruz de Tenerife.7 However, this expansion of infrastructure alone did not fully explain the absence of overcrowding.

Interviews soon revealed that the key factor was not just more space but a shift in political approach. An activist involved in solidarity initiatives since the increase in arrivals in 2020 described the transformation: ‘Now it’s different because they spend little time’ in the camps, ‘this is the first time that people are staying for two weeks. For two years, we had people spending months in the camp.’ And when asked about the reason for this shift, she explained: ‘Now they transfer them’ to the mainland. ‘You stay for a week, two weeks. But now, well, of course, we are going through a different time.’8 The Spanish government’s change in approach  was later confirmed by camp managers, who explained that rapid transfers are coordinated and scheduled by the Ministry of Inclusion, Social Security and Migration based on arrival numbers, specifically to prevent overcrowding. By February 2024 this mechanism had become systematic and transfers were taking place on a weekly basis from the camps.9

Interviews conducted between August 2023 and February 2024 reveal various interpretations of the reasons behind this shift: some attributed it to political activism, others to the need to prevent tensions both inside the centres and with the local population, and there were those  who pointed to the political leverage that the regional government holds over the national government. Another factor could be Spain’s limited capacity to deport people arriving by sea: Gran Canaria’s immigration detention centre recorded fewer than 370 deportations in 2022. While precise reasons remain unclear and may involve a mix of factors, Spain’s evolving approach in the Canary Islands – now centred on rapid identification, categorization, and redistribution across national territory – stands in contrast to the EU’s hardline focus on containment at the entry point, as outlined in the Pact on Migration and Asylum, effective from June 2024.

A divergent border strategy

One of the pact’s central measures is the ‘pre-entry screening’ regulation aimed at classifying individuals, conducting a preliminary assessment of their admissibility into EU territory and processing asylum applications. If an asylum claim is rejected during this stage or the person is identified as an economic migrant, the procedure mandates their referral to return procedures. In other words, the rules prioritize processing migrants at entry points, determining their status quickly and only allowing entry for those deemed eligible while removing all others. The framework for this process permits the restriction of freedom of movement for up to six months.

A key legal mechanism underpinning the pact is the ‘fiction of non-entry’, under which individuals are physically present on the territory but not legally considered to have entered until their admission is approved. Italy’s migration centres in Albania are an extreme example of this approach criticized for possible human rights violations and generating tensions between the executive branch that developed the model and seeks its implementation and the judiciary tasked with approving detentions but never validating them, raising concerns about the legality of these policies. Despite these issues, the European Union Commission has endorsed the approach as a promising model of migration management.

Spain’s apparent divergence from the EU’s approach, initially observed in its limited capacity for deportations and emphasis on transfers to the mainland, becomes even more pronounced when considering how its asylum applications are processed. Although the initial steps of identification and data collection conducted by the police align with the screening mechanisms outlined in the pact, asylum claims of migrants arriving by sea are often not processed immediately within the confines of border facilities at entry points. Instead, as recounted by a CEAR representative, Spain tends to delay the formalization of asylum applications until after individuals have been transferred to the mainland.10

The divergence becomes even more pronounced when examining Spain’s recently adopted Royal Decree 1155/2024 regarding the rights and freedoms of foreign nationals, which will come into effect on 20 May 2025. Contrary to the EU’s push for heightened expulsions of irregular migrants, the new law focuses on facilitating integration and regularization. Key measures include simplifying visa processes and their duration, plus easing access to existing regularization mechanisms and introducing new pathways. The Ministry of Inclusion, Social Security and Migration describes Spain as ‘the only EU country with a specific framework for regularizing migrants through five different “arraigo” modalities’: the legal mechanisms that allow non-EU citizens who are irregularly present in Spain and have lived in the country for a certain period to regularize their status. It estimates that these measures could regularize the status of 300,000 individuals annually over the next three years.

What lies ahead?

While Spain’s recent developments suggest a potential departure from the EU’s detention-focused border management logic, it is premature to declare a consistent and significant shift. First, the implementation of Spain’s new regulatory framework must be evaluated in practice, as the true impact of these policies will depend on how they are applied, not merely on their intentions. Second, Spain’s adaptation to the Pact on Migration and Asylum will play a critical role in shaping the Canary Islands’ future role. Concerns remain valid, especially fears that the archipelago could transform into a ‘large, open-air detention and expulsion centre’, as MEP Estrella Galán has warned.

Which brings us back to the Las Raíces graffiti and the central question of this piece: Does the image of the canary cage still hold true? Based on the developments over the past two years that I was able to observe, it could be said that the image’s meaning has evolved. If seen as representative of the archipelago’s migration control dynamics, the image aptly describes conditions from 2020 to 2021. However, based on developments observed over the past two years, it no longer fully applies. Instead, it remains relevant as a symbol of collective fears – of migrants, local communities and policymakers alike – that the Canary Islands could become island prisons.

The ultimate trajectory of the Canary Islands’ role, however, will depend on the evolving interplay between Spain’s policies and EU pressures. Will the archipelago maintain its position as a hub for identification, categorization and redistribution, or will it gradually realign with broader EU strategies of detention and expulsion?

For now, the graffiti stands not as a final verdict but as a powerful reminder of what was and as a warning of what could still be; the challenges that affect the archipelago’s role in migration management remain all too real.

This article is based on research carried out during the project ‘Elastic Borders: Rethinking the Borders of the 21st Century’ based at the University of Graz, funded by the NOMIS foundation.