ARCHIVED - Boat carrying eight illegal migrants intercepted at Alfaz del Pi, Alicante

The boat was close to the coast of Alfaz de Pi (L'Alfás del Pi) in the Marina Baixa Comarca of the Alicante Province.

Calmer seas and fairer weather have unsurprisingly seen more frequent attempts by boats carrying illegal immigrants to the Spanish coastline, as was the case during the early hours of Saturday morning in Alfaz del Pi, near to Benidorm.

A small craft with eight people on board was detected on a beach in Alfaz del Pi in the province of Alicante at around 4am on Saturday morning, May 8.

Cruz Roja reported that all of those on board, apparently of Algerian origin, were in good health and were taken to the Port of Alicante where they all tested negative for Covid.

The arrival of immigrant "pateras" as they're called in Spanish is an increasingly frequent occurrence in the province; another boat carrying 13 immigrants was intercepted as it reached the coast close to the lighthouse of Cabo de las Huertas in Alicante at the end of March.

Acting on a tip-off, the Policía Nacional and the Policía Local carried out a search of the area and the passengers were detained before being transferred to the port of Alicante to receive health assistance and PCR tests.

And only days earlier, two small boats carrying 25 irregular migrants on board were intercepted off the coast of Murcia, while in mid-February, four pateras carrying 59 people were detected making their way towards the shores of Mazarron and Cartagena.

82 migrants were detained off the Murcian coastline between Thursday and Saturday last week and almost 400 migrants reached the Almerian coastline (Andalucía region) during the same period, due principally to the calm weather conditions.

NB: The migrants are referred to as “irregular immigrants” by the EU; the Spanish media tend to call them “sin papeles” meaning those with no paperwork entering the country illegally, others refer to them as illegal migrants.

The phrase irregular migrants is used to convey that these are not refugees, but economic migrants, in this case from Algeria, entering Spain and the EU in an illegal fashion, without passports or documentation and without any legal right to enter the EU as Algeria is not an EU member and there is no migration agreement between the two countries.