Revealed: Drug smugglers’ new route between Africa and Spain – thanks to ‘floating petrol stations’

Drug traffickers in Africa are being forced to find new ways to avoid detection amid the raging war between smugglers and the Spanish authorities.

For decades, cartels have been ferrying mostly hashish (marijuana) from North Africa across the Strait of Gibraltar and onto Spanish shores.

This business has not stopped, with drop offs regularly witnessed on beaches along the coasts of Huelva, Cadiz and Malaga.

But increasingly, cartels are taking much longer routes in a bid to reduce the number of busts by police.

These now include as far north as Sant Pol de Mar in Barcelona, where a so-called ‘narcolancha’ was recently left dumped on the shore.

‘Narcolanchas’ are RHIB boats; lightweight, high-performance vessels that can travel at speed. Until last year, they had only been caught smuggling drugs onto the shores of Andalucia.

Since then, the Guardia Civil have intercepted such boats between Gandia and Xereco in Valencia, while five smugglers were busted importing 1.7 tonnes of hashish into Mallorca on a RHIB from Africa.

According to El Periodico de Catalunya, cartels in southern Spain have ‘reinvented themselves’ and ‘expanded their sphere of action to unexpected places’.

Francisco Mena, spokesperson for the Campo de Gibraltar Anti-Drug Coordinator, said: ‘They have ingenuity, they have time, and they have a lot of money. They work like a large, organised company.

‘I always say, half-jokingly, that if we let them build the Strait of Gibraltar tunnel, we’d already have it done.’

Floating gas stations

The RHIBs are able to travel for thousands of kilometres thanks to a series of illicit ‘floating gas stations’ known as ‘petacoas’.

Andros Lozaona, an expert on hashish trafficking, explained: ‘There are organisations that have ‘floating gas stations’ in the middle of the sea. They can be recreational boats, small ships, or smaller inflatable boats.

‘These are the ones that supply fuel to drug-laden boats so they can make stops, even for hours or days, along the way to their final destination.’

A spokesperson from the Guardia Civil explained how boats heading from Africa to Cataluña must refuel three times.

They said they typically leave Morocco and stop to refuel off the coast of Almeria, Alicante and northern Valencia.

‘This phenomenon is quite similar to the Galician drug traffickers, who are capable of traveling with their rubber boats as far as the Azores and then sailing up the entire Portuguese coast,’ Lozano added.

Last year, 70% of hashish in Cataluña arrived by sea, which is expected to increase to 75% in 2025.