[ Cronotopo Photo Collective ]

PHOTOGRAPHERS: ARTURO RODRIGUEZ: Singles

African immigrants wait on the quayside in the port of Los Abrigos. They will be transferred to a police station, and later to a holding center from where they will either be repatriated or sent on to the mainland. Spanish officials estimated that more than 31,000 people reached the Atlantic islands illegally during the year, a fivefold increase on 2005.
  
Tourists, security forces, and Red Cross workers attend to African migrants who have landed on La Tejita beach. Tens of thousands of migrants arrived in 2006, in small wooden boats with up to 150 people on board. They faced a sea journey of some 1,000km, and many arrived starving, dehydrated, or died on the way. Some migrants are repatriated, others are sent to mainland Spain, but many end up in limbo, unable to gain work papers yet unwilling to go home.
  
A member of spanish coast guard gestures during a rescue at international seas of a fisher boat from Africa.
     
  
A group of immigrants wait on La Tejita beach after arrive in a boat from occidental Africa.