Ben Pawlowski
A SPANISH mayor has been branded as ‘far-right’ after criticising the decision to move hundreds of adult asylum seekers from the Canary Islands to his small seaside town this week.
Marti Pujal, the mayor for Tossa de Mar, a coastal settlement of 6,000 residents on the Costa Brava popular with Brits, slammed the planned movement of migrants as ‘excessive’ and lacking ‘proportionality’.
Instead, he claims that his municipality should only have to accept 40 migrants given that Blanes, a nearby town with 40,000 residents, received 200 asylum seekers last year.
Pujal, who represents the pro-independence, conservative Junts per Catalunya party, also said he was frustrated that the move would coincide with the peak of the tourism season.
Under the terms of the move, 200 adult migrants, currently located in the Canary Islands, will move to Tossa de Mar where they will spend a month in a hotel whilst their asylum paperwork is processed.
Migrants are being redistributed across Spain as Canarian officials struggle to deal with the number of people making landfall via small boats.
In 2024 so far, over 22,000 migrants have reached the Canary Islands, an archipelago located 800 miles from the Spanish mainland in the Atlantic Ocean and just 67 miles off the African coast.
The route between the western coast of Africa and the Canary Islands is widely regarded as the world’s most dangerous migration route, where some 4,808 deaths were recorded in the first five months of 2024, equating to 33 deaths per day or one every 45 minutes.
The arrival of asylum seekers has provoked a row on social media, with one user accusing Pujals of making ‘a far-right speech’, highlighting that Spain has a ‘huge problem with structural and institutional racism’.
Another pointed out that Tossa de Mar has received over 73,000 tourists so far this year, and that targeting 200 migrants was evidence of dog whistle politics.
However, others supported Pujals’ comments – one user said Tossa de Mar was one of the only Catalan towns not to have ‘suffered processes of depersonalisation and assimilation’, while another opined that ‘it does not make any sense to see so many people, migrants or not, staying in that small place’.
