On Tuesday, 183 people were picked up from a long wooden boat, a so-called pirog, off the coast of Djiffer on Senegal's south coast.
Over the weekend, another boat with 230 people on board was stopped off the capital city of Dakar. The migrants had departed from the Saloum River delta further south, according to the navy on X.
Annually, thousands of migrants depart from Senegal's coast in the hope of reaching Europe. Most have the Spanish island group of the Canary Islands as their target, but the route across the Atlantic is both long and dangerous. The currents are strong and boats that go off course can drift for weeks or months. Every year, thousands of deaths and disappearances are reported from overcrowded and often substandard boats.
Between January and June this year, over 19,000 migrants reached the Canary Islands from West Africa – an increase of 167 percent compared to the same period last year, according to the UN's migration agency IOM.
In late September, Senegal's navy found around 30 bodies in a drifting boat off the country's coast. A few weeks earlier, around 40 people died when a migrant boat sank off the town of M'bour.
Senegal's President Bassirou Diomaye Faye has promised to "ruthlessly pursue" human traffickers and appealed to young people to stay in the West African country.
