Spain: the Cumbre Vieja volcano erupted in the Canaries | President Pedro Sánchez to visit the archipelago

The Cumbre Vieja Volcano located at La Palma, Canary Islands, has erupted this Sunday after being monitored because of its seismic activity. Spanish President Pedro Sánchez visits the archipelago.

The island government announced via its Twitter account that “the eruption has started in the Cabeza de Vaca area, in El Paso” and the evacuation of residents has started. “The population is urged to take extreme precautions and not to approach the area of ​​the eruption to avoid unnecessary risks,” adds the official message.

President Sánchez announced that he had decided to postpone his trip to the United States, where he was going to attend the United Nations General Assembly, to travel to the islands.

“I am currently heading to the Canary Islands, taking into account the seismic evolution, to know first hand the situation on La Palma, the coordination of the device and the activated protocols”, wrote the president on his social networks.

For his part, the regional president of the Canary Islands, Ángel Víctor Torres, underlined the “chance that the eruption occurred in an uninhabited area” of an island of 80,000 inhabitants which is part of the archipelago located near the coast of northwestern Africa.

The Cumbre Vieja volcano was under a high alert level for a week due to an increase in seismic activity on the island: the Institute of Volcanology of the Canaries registered since Saturday thousands of low intensity earthquakes -up to level 4 on the Richter scale- in the region.

Inside the volcano, there were also movements of millions of cubic meters of magma, and the ground rose about ten centimeters in the Cumbre Vieja region.

Thanks to the state of alert, the island authorities had already evacuated people with reduced mobility before the eruption occurred.

The Interior Ministry indicated that more than 200 members of the security forces traveled to the area by helicopter.

The Canary Islands are an archipelago of volcanic origin. The last eruption of Cumbre Vieja dates back to 1971, while in 2011 the last eruption -submarine- was recorded on the island of El Hierro.