Sailing boat from La Palma finds cayuco with ten dead migrants near Brazil

Five German sailors who set sail from the port of Tazacorte (La Palma) found a cayuco with at least ten corpses 350 miles from Brazil. Unable to tow the vessel due to the size of their sailboat, they alerted the Brazilian authorities and marked the position of the barge.

Inside the cayuco they found life jackets, jerry cans of petrol and green mackintoshes, but no survivors. This discovery confirms once again the dangerousness of the Canary Islands migratory route, considered the most lethal in the world.

This is not the first time that boats from Africa have washed up on the other side of the Atlantic. In January, two dinghies with decomposing bodies were found in the Caribbean. In 2024, a barge with 14 bodies washed up in the Dominican Republic, and in 2021, another cayuco with 14 bodies was found in Trinidad and Tobago, confirmed to have departed from Mauritania.

The crossing from Mauritania to the Canary Islands has become one of the most active and dangerous migration routes. According to the Right to Life Monitoring 2024 report by Caminando Fronteras, 6,829 people died on this crossing last year.

Source: canariasahora.es 20/03/2025