Pope visiting ‘dock of shame’ in Canary Islands where migrants slept in squalor

Pope Leo XIV travelled to the Canary Islands on Thursday to draw attention to the plight of migrants who risk their lives trying to reach Europe, fulfilling a wish of Pope Francis to visit one of the epicentres of the European migration debate.

Leo is spending the final two days of his week-long trip to Spain in the Canary Islands, a Spanish archipelago closer to Africa than the Iberian Peninsula and a key point of entry for migrants smuggled from West Africa.

He is meeting recently arrived migrants and representatives of the church and humanitarian organisations that care for them and work to integrate them into Spanish society.

He will commemorate the thousands of lives lost at sea from a port that in 2020 became known as the “dock of shame” because of the squalid conditions in which migrants lived when they went ashore during a spike in arrivals.

Spain’s Socialist-led government, which had been shamed by the 2020 crisis, has bucked a trend in Europe and the United States by defending immigration on economic and humanitarian grounds.

It launched a legalisation push earlier this year for hundreds of thousands of immigrants without authorisation.

Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has highlighted the benefits to the economy with an ageing workforce and low birth rate.

Leo has already called for strengthened international efforts to prevent the smuggling of migrants, the creation of safe pathways for them to move legally and development in countries of origin so more people can choose to stay at home.

In a speech to the Spanish parliament earlier this week, the first by a pope, Leo demanded welcome and integration for those who do choose to flee, insisting on their inherent human dignity.

“The moral greatness of a nation is manifested, above all, in its capacity to accompany, protect and love those lives that are most fragile,” Leo said in a speech that also upheld the inherent dignity of the unborn, the elderly and sick.

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He received a seven-minute standing ovation at the end.

Migrant arrivals in the Canary Islands peaked in 2024 at nearly 47,000, but have fallen dramatically, with just over 3,000 people landing there in the first five months of 2026.

On his arrival in Las Palmas, Leo was to head to Arguineguin, where in 2020 arrivals reached such numbers that migrants were forced to sleep in makeshift camps in the open air on a dock that became known as the “dock of shame”.

Many migrants were left to sleep for weeks with just a blanket and no showers.

Potential asylumseekers had no proper access to legal advice and some people were held for weeks, much longer than the three days that the law allowed.

The ombudsman later forced the government to shut the makeshift camp and relocate the migrants.

Learning of the crisis, Francis had planned to visit the Canary Islands in solidarity, but never managed the trip. Francis had made the plight of refugees a hallmark of his papacy, following the Gospel mandate to “welcome the stranger”.

Leo has followed suit, insisting especially on the dignity of migrants in his native US amid the Trump administration’s crackdown and mass deportation program.

Next month, on July 4, the American pope will spend US Independence Day on the island of Lampedusa, Sicily, another main point of entry for migrants smuggled from North Africa trying to reach Europe.

Francis had visited Lampedusa in 2013, on his first trip outside Rome, and threw a wreath into the Mediterranean in honour of the thousands of migrants who died in the perilous crossing.

It was on that trip that he coined a phrase that became a mantra during his pontificate denouncing the “globalisation of indifference” that the world showed migrants.