The Port of Las Palmas and the port in Tenerife’s capital are consolidating their position as the leading transshipment and logistics-intermediation hub on the Atlantic coast of West Africa. A total of 84.2% of container volume and a Herfindahl-Hirschman Index of 0.296 depend on just three maritime routes. The geographic location of Gran Canaria and Tenerife channels the flow through the main corridor, which accounts for 38.2% of total volume measured in forty-foot units, while also connecting with the route responsible for 35.88% of global traffic.
The operation of strategic terminals such as Boluda Terminal, Rumeu Gestport and Opcsa MSC in Las Palmas, and Boluda and Algetica TC Tenerife in the archipelago consolidates the Canary Islands’ leadership in Central Atlantic connectivity. This explains Morocco’s interest in entering the business involving Boluda’s terminals.
A Jensen-Shannon distance of 0.996 confirms the system’s polarization: import consumption enters through Nouakchott, which handles 91.7% of discharges, while the outbound movement of value-added goods and fishing logistics rely on the installed capacity in the Canary Islands. The study ‘Concentration and distribution of container flows in Mauritania’s maritime system (2019–2022)’, published in Transportation Business & Management by Mohamed Bouka and Moulaye Abdelkader, supports the corridor’s dependence on an analysis of 105,686 shipping records.
Network metrics and centrality
Las Palmas’s importance extends beyond local import and discharge figures and is measured by its logistics interconnection capacity. Network analysis models assign the Gran Canaria facility a weighted betweenness centrality of 0.217, a top-level indicator that places it on a par with the management capacity of the region’s main continental ports. The port serves as the major consolidation and redistribution platform for container ships operated by transoceanic lines and regional vessels.
The fishing hub and the cold chain
On the export side, Las Palmas is positioned as the hub around which the frozen seafood industry revolves. The port of Nouadhibou generates 68.5% of the area’s outbound cargo, more than 53% of which consists of frozen fish and seafood. Las Palmas provides the cold-storage, regulatory and re-export infrastructure needed to redistribute these catches to 281 international destination ports in Europe and Asia.
Vulnerability and geopolitical risks
Modularity analysis divides regional logistics into two blocks: the supply circuit and the maritime export circuit. The network displays a high degree of rigidity. Node-removal simulations show that disrupting the main port of discharge would deprive the system of 76.9% of its operational traffic (138,810 forty-foot units), leaving the region with only 23.1% of its receiving capacity on alternative routes. By contrast, removing ten random ports would leave 97.7% of flows intact.
Almost half of Mauritania’s container trade (45.3%) moves along Far East and Middle East corridors that conventionally pass through global chokepoints such as the Suez Canal, Bab el-Mandeb and the Strait of Hormuz. This geopolitical exposure makes island terminals such as OPCSA and Algetica TC Tenerife essential logistics support points for mitigating supply-chain risks, strengthening cold-chain resilience and ensuring compliance with health and traceability standards for fishery exports to the international market.
The article ‘The ports of Las Palmas and Tenerife’s capital account for 84% of the Central Atlantic fishing business’ was first published on canarymaritime.com.
