Borja Moreno has less than 48 hours before he bids goodbye to the corpses. As the head of the forensic institute on Ceuta, a Spanish exclave in North Africa, his job is to do autopsies on the bodies of migrants who die en route. He has no freezing chamber, so every drowned swimmer must be buried swiftly. Ceuta sees a few dozen per year. Numbers in the Canary Islands, where 73% of migrants to Spain arrive, are much higher: in January some 50 died in one accident. Even islands that have freezers have trouble managing the volume.

Bodies are kept for weeks awaiting judicial authorisation and space in cemeteries, says Ramón Llorente, the sole forensic doctor on the tiny island of La Gomera. Neighbouring El Hierro has managed the surge by buying more freezers and using public funeral homes. “Resources are getting slimmer,” says Haridian Marichal, a journalist who organises funerals for unidentified migrants. Shipping bodies to bigger islands helps, but they get crowded too. Last year Tenerife’s storage space repeatedly hit the limit.

A record 61,323 migrants reached Spanish shores in 2024. According to Caminando Fronteras, a migration NGO, 30 people a day died making the journey, up by over 60% from 2023. Most bodies are never recovered. In September Andalusia’s regional government began requiring forensic doctors to collect DNA within 48 hours to hurry things along. But speed has a trade-off: it means migrants may be buried in unmarked graves while their families are still searching. Spanish authorities identified fewer than half of those recovered between 2014 and 2019.

Maria Angeles Colsa Herrera of the International Centre for Identifying Missing Migrants, an NGO, recommends waiting longer before burial. Exhuming bones requires red tape and violates Islamic law. In 2021 the European Parliament called for better identification processes for migrants’ bodies, but little progress has been made. “This cannot be normalised,” says Mr Moreno. “If I have to emigrate and I die somewhere, I would want my body to be stored and returned to my mother.”■

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