More than four thousand, one hundred Malians arrived in Spain’s Canary Islands in 2020 alone.

This is according to data from the European Asylum Support Office (EASO) released on Thursday.

Up until the start of this year, citizens from Mali that had arrived in the archipelago were invisible to both Spanish and EU authorities, who considered all arrivals to be economic migrants – not asylum seekers.

However, Malian citizens have made nearly 1,300 formal requests for asylum in Spain in 2021 – the third-highest number of all nationalities.

Patrick Sallia has the details.