TENERIFE, Spain, The boat was so full that Bakary Jaiju says there was no real place to sit, only bodies pressed together on wood and open sea.
“You can’t even sleep in case you fall in,” he said quietly. “You just stay awake and hope.”
Jaiju was 19 when he left The Gambia, crossing the Atlantic in a wooden boat with more than 150 people. After seven days at sea, the water ran out, then the food. What stayed was the sound of the ocean and the feeling that land might never come.
“I decided to go, whether I survive or I die,” he said. “I just wanted my family to be in a better condition.”
He survived. Many others did not.
It is stories like his that Pope Leo is expected to hear and amplify during his visit this week to the Canary Islands, where thousands of migrants arrive each year after dangerous journeys from West Africa.
Church officials say the pope will meet survivors, aid workers and volunteers, and take part in a quiet moment of remembrance at the shoreline in Gran Canaria, where he is expected to drop flowers into the sea for those who never made it.
For those working on the islands, the deaths are not distant statistics. They arrive with the boats or with the silence when a boat never shows up.
Search and rescue crews and aid groups say the Atlantic route remains one of the deadliest migration paths in the world. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimates hundreds die each year, though no one can truly count them. Some boats vanish without a trace.
The journey itself is simple in explanation but brutal in reality. People leave from places like Senegal or The Gambia in overcrowded wooden boats, often paying smugglers everything they have or everything their families can gather. There is no navigation system. No guarantee of fuel. Just the hope that currents and luck will line up.
European patrols funded by the EU have increased interceptions off West Africa, and arrivals to Spain have fallen this year. But those who work along the route say the sea has not become safer only more unpredictable, as boats are pushed farther out or take longer, riskier paths.
When migrants do arrive, they are brought to reception centers across the islands. For many, the first feeling is not relief, but exhaustion that goes deeper than sleep.
Jaiju remembers those early days in Tenerife as a blur of cold rooms, medical checks and waiting for people to explain what happens next.
“You are alive,” he said, “but you don’t know what life you are in.”
Help often comes from small places rather than large systems. One of those places is a modest foundation run by a priest known locally as Padre Pepe, who sees young migrants after they turn 18 and lose state care.
He does not soften his words when describing what happens to those who are left alone.
“The streets will eat you up,” he said. “Young people like this, they disappear.”
His program now houses around 170 young men, teaching Spanish, offering shelter and trying to connect them to work.
In Gran Canaria, 19 year old Tiene Lama from Ivory Coast now works in a car repair workshop. He sends money home each month.
“It’s the first time I can help my family,” he said, as he wiped grease from his hands.
Employers across the islands say they have little choice but to look to migration to fill jobs in construction, tourism and transport.
“We couldn’t find local people who wanted to work with us,” said Diana del Molino Rodríguez of the Domingo Alonso Group. Her company now employs dozens of young migrants in technical roles.
Still, migration has become one of Spain’s most divisive political issues. The conservative Popular Party has criticized a government plan allowing undocumented migrants who arrived before a cutoff date to apply for residency. The far-right Vox party calls migration an “invasion” and blames it for pressure on public services.
The government of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez argues the opposite: that Spain’s ageing population and labor shortages mean migrants are needed, not just politically but economically.
Local officials in the Canary Islands live with that contradiction every day.
“We don’t have enough workers in hotels or construction,” said Francis Candil, deputy minister for welfare in the islands. “But we also have people arriving after risking their lives at sea.”
He said Europe needs more than tighter borders. It needs legal ways for people to move, so they do not have to gamble their lives on the ocean.
The debate is unfolding as the European Union rolls out a new migration and asylum system aimed at faster processing and more returns for rejected applicants. Supporters call it necessary control. Critics say it will only push people into more dangerous routes.
But none of that language is what Jaiju thinks about when he remembers the sea.
He thinks about the moment the engine stopped. About the silence that followed. About watching other boats disappear into the dark.
Now he is learning Spanish and trying to stay in the country he once crossed an ocean to reach. His future is still uncertain, but he is no longer on the water.
“I was lucky,” he said again, as if still trying to understand it. “Others are still there.”
