More than 3,000 died attempting to reach Spain by sea in 2025: Report

By Aysu Bicer

LONDON (AA) - More than 3,000 people died trying to reach Spain by sea over the past year, according to a new report, marking a sharp fall compared with the previous 12 months.

The NGO Caminando Fronteras said 3,090 people drowned between January and Dec. 15, 2025, including 192 women and 437 children.

The victims came from 30 countries, mainly in West and North Africa, but also from Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Iraq, and Egypt.

Activists warned that the decline in deaths did not mean the journeys had become safer, arguing instead that tighter border controls were pushing migrants onto increasingly dangerous routes.

The report found that the Atlantic crossing from North Africa to the Canary Islands remained the deadliest route, accounting for 1,906 deaths this year. The journey can take up to 12 days at sea.

A growing number of migrants also attempted the route from Algeria to the Balearic Islands, where 1,037 people lost their lives.

Caminando Fronteras also highlighted the emergence of a new route from Guinea to the Canary Islands, underscoring what it described as the increasing risks faced by people trying to reach Spain by sea.

The report also criticized what it described as a global hardening of migration policies during 2025, with particular focus on the US.

It said measures promoted by the US administration had “transformed the global map of mobility,” amounting to “a public declaration of a contained and invisible war” against migrants.

According to the report, US-led deportation policies had helped create a model that externalizes expulsions to third countries, in some cases resulting in migrants being held in prisons, in legal limbo, or even on US military bases abroad.

The organization said these practices mirrored policies adopted elsewhere, citing the UK’s plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda — later halted by the British Supreme Court — and Italy’s creation of detention centers in Albania.

Taken together, the report said, such measures were consolidating “a transnational system in which mobility is managed through institutional violence and the denial of basic guarantees.”