[The Guardian] El Hierro: the tiny Canary Island at centre of migration crisis – photo essay

El Hierro: the tiny Canary Island at centre of migration crisis – photo essay

Ten years ago, El Hierro staked everything on sustainability and renewable energy. Today it faces another epochal challenge: migration from Africa, a phenomenon that is turning it into the Lampedusa of the Atlantic

“We can’t go on like this. We are only 30 doctors in all and over 20,000 migrants arrived on the island in 2024. It’s a disaster, and it will get worse and worse.” Ana Torres is a doctor in El Hierro’s only hospital. Today she is particularly disconsolate, because the smallest and most remote of the Canary Islands, a Unesco biosphere reserve since 2000 and famous for having achieved energy self-sufficiency, now has to deal with a new emergency: that of refugees and migrants.

An emergency doctor talks to a patient who arrived in bad condition in the previous days after a long sea voyage, at the island’s only hospital: the Nuestra Señora de los Reyes in Valverde

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