2024 is over, but not before hitting a historic high for the number of people dying at Spain’s borders. According to data from the NGO Caminando Fronteras, at least 10,457 people died or disappeared trying to reach Spanish territory by irregular maritime routes over the last twelve months — a 58 percent increase from 2023. The vast majority of these victims (9,757) were trying to reach Spain’s Canary Islands, off the West African coast — as the European Union (EU)–sponsored crackdown in the central Mediterranean and the war in Mali forced tens of thousands of people to risk their lives on treacherous, long-distance routes on the Atlantic Ocean.

Largely traveling in traditional wooden fishing boats known as cayucos, migrants taking this route can spend between four days and two weeks on the ocean — with many such journeys complicated further due to the frequency of engine failures on these vessels. “The boat began to drift; we were being carried away by the waves,” recounts T. D., a Malian survivor of one such tragedy. As food and water ran out onboard his cayuco, T. D. tells Caminando Fronteras that “lives were extinguished one after another.” “I thought I’d be next, but it was my brother,” he continues. “I told him not to drink seawater, to hold on, but he kept drinking, then vomiting, and then he sat down and stopped speaking. I couldn’t bring myself to throw his body overboard; some other people did it instead.”

Before being rescued, T. D. and the other survivors were forced to witness a whole family die: “The father ended up throwing himself into the sea once he’d placed the last of his children into the water. We had no strength left to stop him.”