The island of Lampedusa is Mediterranean holiday bliss, known for its sapphire seas and sandy beaches. But look beyond the palm trees and pleasure boats, and you’ll notice the signs of something darker.
Month after month, bodies are found floating off Lampedusa’s coast. They are different nationalities, ages and genders, but all were migrants who drowned while travelling on dangerous small boats in a bid to reach Europe.
Situated between the tip of Africa and Italy, Lampedusa is a key landing point for these journeys, recording one of the highest rates of small boat arrivals anywhere in Europe. More than 20,000 people have arrived in Italy by sea this year alone, mostly through Lampedusa, which has just 5,000 inhabitants.
From Italy, some continue to Germany, France or across the Channel to the UK, mostly seeking out relatives or a common language.
Last year, the central Mediterranean route – from North Africa to Southern Europe – was the most active migration route into the EU, continuing a long-term trend. Arrivals peaked in 2023, with more than 150,000 people making the journey.
However, in the first nine months of this year, the number of arrivals through the central Mediterranean dropped to 22,500, a 56 per cent decline on the same point in 2025. This is thought to be down to a combination of tougher border policies from Italy and an increase in interceptions by Libya, from where most of the boats depart. The Libyan authorities are supported by the EU, despite being accused of involvement in the abuse of migrants.
This year, figures indicate that more crossings will be made from Turkey to Greece. Others reach Europe by travelling from North Africa to mainland Spain or the Canary Islands.
Many people do not survive the journey. At least 996 people have died on the central Mediterranean route this year alone, and in the last decade, the number recorded missing has reached nearly 27,000. This makes it the deadliest known migration route in the world.
Shipwrecks around these coasts have become common – search and rescue ships are docked in the harbour next to yachts, and Red Cross ambulances are parked next to rented scooters.
Last month, the humanitarian organisation Sea Watch dispatched a rescue boat in response to an alert about 40 people who were on a flimsy rubber boat. When the crew reached their position, it found a deflated boat with five people aboard and two bodies – one a child aged around eight. But six were missing, including three children.
“One mother survived and lost three children on the same night,” says Sea Watch crew member Rebecca Giarola, sitting on-board the rescue boat docked in Lampedusa’s harbour. Sea Watch believes the authorities were alerted to this case 12 hours before they found the wreckage, and did not send out a rescue.
Instead, the crew carried the survivors and bodies back to land. “The survivors we had on-board were incredibly strong in enduring a transit to [Lampedusa] with bodies on board,” Giarola says. “It’s a trauma that I don’t know if it can be healed.”
Nicola Dell’Arciprete is the head of Unicef in Italy, which supports many of the 4,400 children who have travelled to Italy unaccompanied this year. According to Unicef, 3,500 children and adolescents have died or gone missing attempting to cross the central Mediterranean migration route in the last decade – equivalent to a child disappearing almost every day.
The migrants travel on “completely unseaworthy” rubber dinghies, like those used to cross the Channel into Britain, and unstable wooden boats. But there has also been a rise in the use of iron boats in recent years, with migrants telling one humanitarian organisation they were forced to weld the vessel themselves.
“In many cases they sink and they’re never found,” Dell’Arciprete says, sitting on a rock on Lampedusa’s jagged coast.
Those who survive the route are often severely dehydrated or suffering from hypothermia. Women and children are frequently burned on the journey, as leaking fuel mixes with saltwater to create a toxic liquid which washes against their legs. It gathers in the centre of the boat, where women and children are placed to reduce the risk of them falling off. Rescuers have seen people so badly burned they cannot sit down because of the pain.
There is also widespread evidence of sexual violence along the route, with women often seeking care after having been raped. At least one search and rescue ship in the central Mediterranean even provides abortions on-board.
“Many of them have caught diseases along the trip. Many have been abused or victims of violence in the countries they are coming from,” Dell’Arciprete says. “There is this physical trauma, but there is other trauma as well that is not visible immediately. The trauma that these adolescents face – it’s something that no person should ever experience.”
Some boats arrive on Lampedusa independently, but most are intercepted and taken to shore by the Italian authorities, where they are met by ambulances and aid workers on a designated pier. Just metres away lies a harbour filled with pleasure boats, frequented by the tens of thousands of Italian tourists who flock to the island each year, despite its deadly reputation.
In the past three years, at least two women have given birth while on-board small boats, with doctors cutting their umbilical cords on the pier.
Although successful crossings are broadly declining, Lampedusa still sees around four boats arriving every day during the week I visit the island. Journalists are not allowed on the pier, but one afternoon I see four women walk up it wearily, with a man carrying a toddler. They are followed by 29 men, one wearing an Arsenal top. A man limping up the pier says he doesn’t know how long he was at sea, before an official interrupts our conversation and tells me to leave.
Another day, someone is pushed up the pier on a stretcher, moments before an ambulance with sirens blaring rushes down the harbour.
From the pier, arrivals are ushered onto minibuses and driven to a centre on the other side of the island, called the Hotspot, which is cut off by a large, metal gate that slides open when another minibus enters and slams shut behind it. The process is swift – tourists could easily never see a thing.
Outside the centre, four police cars and a van are parked up, as well as a portable medical unit providing obstetrics and gynaecological care, a reminder of the sexual violence many of those inside the centre have faced.
The head of the centre, Imad Dalil, who works for the Italian Red Cross, meets me outside the Hotspot, where 215 of 700 beds are full. At one point in 2023, the Hotspot held 12,500 people, with arrivals frequently topping 3,000 per day.
In the winter, Dalil regularly meets migrants who have spent days on the water. When they touch the pier, they have just “1 per cent of their power” and are often unable to walk, he says.
On arrival at the Hotspot, the first thing they do is charge their phones and connect to Wi-Fi so they can call home and tell their families they are alive. They receive clothes and toiletries, and the team explains the rules. Sometimes, they also need to explain where they are.
“Sometimes they ask, ‘Where is the railway station? They know they are in Italy, but sometimes they don’t realise that they are on an island,’” Dalil says.
The Hotspot has five blocks – two for women and families, one for teenagers travelling alone, and another two for men. The staff can share food for a thousand people in one hour – all halal, as 80 per cent of arrivals are Muslim.
After they are registered with fingerprints, migrants are able to come and go on Lampedusa. Most stay for just 24 to 48 hours though before being moved by ferry or plane to Sicily, where they further their asylum claims, and from there across mainland Italy.
The reasons migrants make the journey differ for each individual and nationality, Dalil says. Some are fleeing war or persecution, others seeking to escape poverty and build a new life.
“I saw teenagers, 12 or 13 years old, that came here alone, without relatives, only to escape becoming young soldiers, in countries like Sudan, Somalia or Eritrea,” Dalil says. “They think: I will die there for sure, but I am risking maybe dying on the water, or maybe reaching Europe or Italy to be safe.”
He recalls a quote he read in a book: “If a mother doesn’t think that the water is safer than where they are at that moment, she will never put her baby on the boat.”
Smugglers appear to charge different amounts for different nationalities and types of boats, but $2,500 (£1,876) is believed to be the minimum price to reach Lampedusa. It is usually saved through work or crowdfunded by a community, on the understanding they will be paid back through more lucrative work in Europe.
Dalil is regularly confronted with the darkest part of the human experience, but also, sometimes, unexpected joy. He recalls a man who arrived on a small boat with a child of around three years old and informed the staff that she was not related to him – she had been separated from her family as they got on to the boat and he had taken care of her.
Hours later, another boat arrived, with a crying man who said: ‘I lost my daughter during the embarkation, and I don’t have any kind of news about her. I don’t know if she’s in Tunisia, if she’s in the Mediterranean water.'” Dalil took the man into a room and brought in the girl. She shouted: “Daddy!”
“That was incredible,” he says. “That moment, I think I will take it inside my heart for all my life.”
It is hard to believe that this world coexists with the bustling, oblivious holidaymaking near by.
“Lampedusa is very famous everywhere. They know what happens,” Dalil says of the tourists. Sometimes tourists even visit the gates of the Hotspot. “But there is no contact,” he says. “They know that there is this centre, but it is separated.”
Despite the boat arrivals, tourism on the island is booming, with more than 42,000 visitors in 2025, according to data shared by the local tourism board.
A souvenir shopowner says migrant arrivals have not deterred visitors. Similarly, a bartender says the small boat arrivals do not affect business. “They don’t stay here,” he says of the migrants. “You don’t see them on the island.”
Mattia Forlini, 27, a local diving instructor, says the migrant arrivals “don’t bother the tourists” or affect the tourism industry “at all”, though on one dive a few years ago, his colleagues saw a small boat and helped with a rescue.
Rarely is the contrast between Lampedusa’s two worlds more stark than in its cemetery. On the top of a cliff, overlooking a popular beach, it is filled with row after row of tall, ornate marble graves adorned with flowers and photographs, commemorating beloved locals.
In the middle of the cemetery is a square with around 20 simple, foot-high crosses, mostly made from driftwood, marking the bodies of those who drowned trying to reach Italy. Most are unnamed.
Pinned to one cross is a photograph of a baby in a striped babygrow – a boy called Yousef born in Libya who died in the Mediterranean just seven months later. Another shows a young man smiling at the camera – 23-year-old Nazem from Sudan, who is buried with 30-year-old Mokwele from Cameroon. The pair died during a rescue on a stormy night in March last year, 40 miles from the Libyan coast. The note ends with a question: “Why?”
Many others will never be known, their bodies and boats disappearing, unseen, off Lampedusa’s buzzing, bustling coast.