The tourist season on the Balearic Islands is starting – but more and more victims of a deadly escape route across the Mediterranean are washing up on the islands.
The holiday season is starting on Mallorca, Menorca, Ibiza, Formentera and Cabrera. Since January, however, 15 corpses have also been discovered on the beaches of the Balearic Islands. They presumably come from boats known as ‘pateras’, which set off from Algeria in the direction of the Balearic Islands and sank on the 300 kilometre-long sea route in the western Mediterranean. Among others, the authorities registered a boat with a group of Somali refugees as missing in February.
At least five bodies were washed up in Mallorca, apparently drifting in the sea for weeks. The decomposed body of a woman was discovered floating in the water near the (among Germans) famous bar ‘Ballermann’, which started its new season on Saturday. Sometimes only individual body parts, such as a leg, are recovered. Identification is also difficult as no ID documents are found on the bodies and there is no international database on missing migrants to compare their DNA.
Tunisia is the main country of departure on the route to Europe for most refugees, accounting for over 90 per cent. According to EU estimates, only around two per cent of boats currently depart from Algeria. The bodies found therefore prove that this route is extremely deadly.
The Balearic Islands have become the second largest hotspot for migration to Spain after the Canary Islands. According to official government figures, at least 5,846 migrants on board 347 boats reached the Balearic Islands in 2024 – more than twice as many as in the previous year. Refugee organisations and the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) assume that the number of unreported cases is higher. According to the UN organisation, 2,600 people have already died or gone missing crossing the Mediterranean in 2024 alone.
There is no end in sight for the Balearic Islands either: in the stormy winter months of January to March alone, almost 1,000 migrants arrived on the holiday islands. Other boats that have set course for Mallorca in recent months are also missing.
On Friday last week, the ‘Watch the Med – Alarm Phone’ network, which operates a hotline for migrants in distress at sea, reported another missing boat with 28 people. They had set off from Algeria towards the Balearic Islands five days earlier. The organisation fears another shipwreck and has therefore alerted the Spanish and Algerian maritime rescue coordination centres. The activists criticise that the authorities have failed to act while the relatives have no news of the boat’s occupants and the weather has deteriorated.
The local police also fear that even more bodies will wash up on the Balearic Islands in April. More than a million tourists are expected there during the Easter holidays, most of them from Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
Published in German in „nd“.
Image: Policia Nacional.
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