How the PSSA fits the wider framework
A Particularly Sensitive Sea Area is an area the IMO recognizes as needing special protection through IMO action because of its ecological, socio-economic or scientific significance and its vulnerability to damage from international shipping. The governing instrument today is IMO Assembly Resolution A.982(24) of 1 December 2005, the Revised Guidelines, as amended by Resolution MEPC.267(68) of 15 May 2015. The Canary Islands proposal predates the Revised Guidelines: MEPC.134(53) was assessed against the earlier Guidelines in Resolution A.927(22), the framework then in force. The PSSA overview sets out the criteria families and the designation process in full.
The Canary Islands PSSA was adopted at MEPC 53 on 22 July 2005, the same session that designated the Galapagos PSSA by the neighboring Resolution MEPC.135(53). Both were among the first PSSAs to pair an area to be avoided with a mandatory reporting regime. The Canary Islands case is distinctive in three respects: the protected attribute is dominated by resident and migratory cetaceans rather than by reef or intertidal habitat, the threat is dominated by the dense north-south tanker corridor between northern Europe and the Gulf, and the area sits inside the territorial sea and exclusive economic zone of a single European Union member state with the enforcement reach that implies.
A PSSA is not the same instrument as a MARPOL Special Area. A Special Area under MARPOL restricts overboard discharges of a defined substance, oil, noxious liquids, sewage or garbage. A PSSA is a broader package that can include routeing, reporting and other navigational measures, and it takes its teeth from the SOLAS Chapter V measures and from MARPOL provisions that already bind ships. The Canary Islands waters are not a MARPOL Special Area under any annex; the protective force of the PSSA comes entirely from the SOLAS V routeing and reporting measures in MSC.213(81) and from the MARPOL Annex I discharge controls that apply everywhere.
Geography of the archipelago
The Canary Isles comprise seven larger islands and six islets at latitude 28 to 29 degrees north, forming an archipelago of volcanic origin in the Atlantic about 100 km off the western coast of Africa, with a total land area of 7,273 square kilometers. For administration the islands are divided into two provinces: Santa Cruz de Tenerife, comprising Tenerife, La Palma, La Gomera and El Hierro, and Las Palmas, comprising Gran Canaria, Lanzarote and Fuerteventura. The islets, Alegranza, La Graciosa, Montana Clara, Roque del Este, Roque del Oeste and Lobos, group around Lanzarote and Fuerteventura.
The island margins are unlike the gently shelving coasts of most archipelagos. Each island is the summit of a submerged mountain rising directly from deep ocean. The depth profile is sharply defined, with very narrow island shelves and steeply sloping shores scored by landslide channels that descend to the abyssal plain. Deep water sits close to the coast. That single fact, deep water within sight of land, drives both the ecology and the navigational risk. Pelagic and deep-diving cetaceans can occur a few nautical miles offshore, and a casualty can ground or founder in conditions that give little drift time before contact with a coast made of basalt cliffs and porous pyroclastic rock that the resolution itself describes as difficult to restore once polluted.
The seabeds around the archipelago remain unstable, shaped by continuing volcanic activity and frequent landslides on a prograding margin. The 2021 Cumbre Vieja eruption on La Palma, which built a lava delta into the sea on the island’s west coast, is a recent reminder that this is an active volcanic frontier rather than a settled coastline. The PSSA boundary, defined in Annex 1 of MEPC.134(53) by a fourteen-point polygon running from point A at 28 degrees 56 minutes north, 18 degrees 13 minutes west clockwise around the archipelago, encloses the full island group and the deep water between and around the islands.
Ecological criteria: cetaceans, seabirds and endemism
The ecological case rests first on the marine fauna of European importance. By its Decision of 28 December 2001 the European Commission adopted a list of Sites of Community Importance for the Macaronesian biogeographical region under the Habitats Directive (Directive 92/43/EEC) on the conservation of natural habitats and of wild fauna and flora. Of 168 habitats listed in that directive, 24 occur in the Canary Isles. The Spanish waters around the islands hold around 20 cetacean species, from dolphins to large whales, over 500 species of fish, and thousands of invertebrate species across a coastline of 1,540 km and more than 300 protected spaces, including four national parks, two marine reserves, 27 special bird protection areas and three islands declared biosphere reserves.
The cetacean concentration is the heart of the proposal. The resolution singles out the seas off Teno-Rasca in the south of Tenerife, Mogan in the south of Gran Canaria, and Santiago Valle Gran Rey off La Gomera, where warm calm water for most of the year and deep water near the coast create living conditions for a range of cetaceans. This is the distribution area of the bottlenose dolphin and, among other species, the short-finned pilot whale Globicephala macrorhynchus, the rough-toothed dolphin Steno bredanensis, the Atlantic spotted dolphin Stenella frontalis, the common dolphin Delphinus delphis, the striped dolphin Stenella coeruleoalba, Risso’s dolphin Grampus griseus, the sperm whale Physeter macrocephalus and Bryde’s whale Balaenoptera edeni. Some maintain resident populations; others visit to feed or breed. The waters off Teno-Rasca hold one of the few known resident populations of short-finned pilot whales in the world, and the Teno-Rasca strip later became Spain’s first Whale Heritage Site.
Two facts about these animals shape the navigational risk. Deep-diving species rest at or near the surface between dives, where a vessel approaching at speed can strike them, and they rely on sound for navigation, foraging and communication, so they are sensitive to the radiated noise of propellers and machinery. Cuvier’s beaked whale Ziphius cavirostris, present in Canary waters and among the deepest-diving mammals known, is acutely vulnerable to acute acoustic disturbance; mass strandings of beaked whales in the archipelago have been linked in the scientific literature to mid-frequency naval sonar, which led Spain to establish a moratorium on naval exercises in the surrounding waters. The PSSA addresses the merchant-traffic component of that pressure: ship strike and continuous noise from the through-traffic and the inter-island fleet.
The islands also support exceptional bird life. The islets north of Lanzarote are a nesting refuge recognized at European level, home to Bulwer’s petrel Bulweria bulwerii, the little shearwater Puffinus assimilis, the band-rumped storm petrel, the white-faced storm petrel Pelagodroma marina and the Madeira petrel Oceanodroma castro, alongside the osprey, the Egyptian vulture and Eleonora’s falcon. The leeward side of Jandia in southern Fuerteventura holds the only place in the European Union where the loggerhead sea turtle Caretta caretta has historically laid eggs. The sebadales, beds of marine spermatophytes off Lanzarote and Fuerteventura, are nursery grounds that support long-range pelagic fish. The resolution describes a system of high biodiversity but low total biomass: a fragile, oligotrophic, easily disturbed marine environment.
Social, economic and scientific criteria
The socio-economic case turns on tourism. The Canaries are a leading European destination, and the resolution states plainly that the service sector accounts for 80 percent of the islands’ overall economy. Damage to the marine environment, a polluted beach or an oiled coast, strikes directly at the economic base. Designation was sought precisely to regulate and control intensive shipping and to minimize the effects of accidental pollution before it could reach that coast.
The scientific and educational case rests on a dense research infrastructure. The University of La Laguna, the Faculty of Marine Sciences at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, the Canarian Institute of Marine Sciences and the Canary Islands Oceanographic Centre of the Spanish Institute of Oceanography form a teaching and research base, supported by the Museum of Natural Sciences in Tenerife, the Island Marine Agency and the Gran Canaria animal recovery center. That recovery center cares for dozens of turtles damaged by oil and around fifteen beached cetaceans every year, a figure that quantifies the standing pressure the PSSA was meant to reduce.
UNESCO recognition predates the PSSA in part. In 1983 UNESCO declared part of La Palma a biosphere reserve, El Canal y Los Tiles, then the smallest of its kind in Spain at 500 hectares. The biosphere designations on Lanzarote, La Palma and El Hierro are referenced directly in the ATBA descriptions of the resolution, which name three of the five avoidance areas as biosphere reserves and the other two as cetacean breeding grounds. The PSSA and the biosphere reserves are separate instruments addressing the same coast; the PSSA carries the navigational measures the UNESCO designations cannot.
Vulnerability: the tanker corridor and the Las Palmas bunkering hub
The vulnerability case is a traffic case. The waters off the Canaries carry extensive maritime activity because of their geostrategic position on the route between Europe and the South Atlantic, West Africa and the Cape. The ports supply the resident population, export goods and serve heavy tourist traffic. The dominant risk, stated in the resolution, comes from the intensive traffic of large oil tankers bound to and from the Persian Gulf: these sail in ballast on the northbound leg and loaded on the southbound leg, with uncontrolled spillage of oil residues in both directions, and the number of such vessels was estimated at 1,500 per year at the time of designation. The oil refinery with its sea terminal on Tenerife received an average of 4 million tonnes of oil per year, and chemical tankers were a notable presence either on the through-route or calling at Canarian ports.
Layered on the through-traffic is the bunkering trade. Las Palmas de Gran Canaria is one of the major bunkering hubs of the eastern Atlantic, a standing call for ships taking fuel on the long ocean legs between Europe, West Africa and the Americas. Bunkering concentrates laden fuel-oil movements, ship-to-ship transfers and tanker calls in the same waters the PSSA protects, and it is the activity behind the CANREP focus on heavy-oil tankers. A bunkering hub raises the count of the exact ship type, laden with the exact cargo, persistent heavy fuel oil, that would do the most damage to this coast in a casualty.
The inter-island fleet adds a third strand. Fast ferries run frequent high-speed services between the islands, crossing the deep cetacean habitat at speeds that turn an undetected whale at the surface into a fatal strike. The PSSA’s cetacean concern is therefore not only about the international tanker on the north-south corridor; it is also about the domestic high-speed traffic that the Spanish authorities regulate under national rules supplementary to the IMO measures.
The designation polygon and how the boundaries nest
Annex 1 of MEPC.134(53) fixes the PSSA by a fourteen-point polygon, points A to N, drawn on Spanish Navy Hydrographic Institute chart No. 209, second edition, WGS 84 datum. The polygon runs from point A at 28 degrees 56 minutes north, 18 degrees 13 minutes west, through point G at 29 degrees 37 minutes north, 13 degrees 19 minutes west at the northeast corner near the African coast, down to point J at 27 degrees 32 minutes north, 15 degrees 35 minutes west at the south, and back through points K to N off the western islands. The enclosed envelope holds all seven islands, the six islets and the deep water between them, well beyond the territorial sea so that the cetacean grounds and the through-traffic corridor both sit inside the protected area.
Three spatial layers nest inside that envelope, and confusing them is the most common planning mistake. The outermost is the PSSA polygon, the area inside which the package of measures has effect. Next is the CANREP reporting area, a separate polygon that follows the 12-nautical-mile territorial-sea limit using the same lettered inflection points, so a tanker can be inside the PSSA but outside the territorial-sea reporting line and still be expected to honor the routeing measures. Innermost are the five ATBA boxes, each a small rectangle or polygon hugging one island’s most sensitive coast, and the two traffic separation schemes that thread the central channels between Gran Canaria, Tenerife and Fuerteventura. A vessel reads these as concentric obligations: stay in the lanes where a scheme applies, keep persistent-pollutant cargo clear of the five boxes, and report to the right MRCC once across the territorial-sea line.
The boundaries were drawn to the geography rather than to round numbers. The ATBA off El Hierro is the most complex, a five-sided polygon rather than a simple lat-long box, because the island’s deep-diving cetacean habitat and biosphere-reserve waters do not fit a rectangle. The Tenerife and Gran Canaria boxes are open to the coast, bounded by a single offshore meridian and two parallels, so the avoidance zone runs right up to the shoreline of the Teno-Rasca and Mogan cetacean grounds. This is deliberate: the persistent-pollutant carriers are pushed offshore of the exact strips where the resident pilot whales and the visiting deep divers concentrate.
APM 1 and 2: the two traffic separation schemes
The first group of Associated Protective Measures is two traffic separation schemes, adopted under SOLAS Chapter V Regulation 10 on ships’ routeing and charted on Spanish Navy Hydrographic Institute chart No. 209 on the WGS 84 datum. Both schemes channel the dense cross-traffic between the three central islands onto defined lanes and away from the inshore cetacean waters.
The Eastern Traffic Separation Scheme, between Gran Canaria and Fuerteventura, has two traffic lanes each three miles wide, an intermediate separation zone two miles wide, a rectangular precautionary area, and two inshore traffic zones. Southbound traffic runs on a 200 degree true course, northbound on a 020 degree true course, with the precautionary area at the junction and inshore zones along the east coast of Gran Canaria and the leeward approaches. The Western Traffic Separation Scheme, between Gran Canaria and Tenerife, mirrors that geometry: two lanes each three miles wide, a two-mile separation zone, a precautionary area and two inshore zones, with southbound traffic on a 220 degree true course and northbound on a 040 degree true course.
A traffic separation scheme is the strongest of the routeing measures in practical effect. Under COLREG Rule 10, a vessel using a TSS must proceed in the appropriate lane, keep clear of the separation line or zone, and avoid crossing lanes except at as near a right angle as practicable. That makes the lane discipline binding through the collision regulations even though the underlying routeing measure is adopted as a SOLAS V/10 instrument. Ships may give voluntary notification of entry to and departure from the schemes via the Las Palmas or Tenerife regional MRCC on VHF channel 16, which is separate from the mandatory CANREP report.
APM 3: the five Areas To Be Avoided
The central environmental measure is five Areas To Be Avoided, one off each of five islands. The resolution’s instruction is precise: to prevent the risks of pollution and environmental damage in highly sensitive sea areas, all tankers and ships over 500 gross tonnage carrying oil or dangerous bulk cargo as cargo should avoid the named areas. The five areas are:
- Off Lanzarote (biosphere reserve): between meridians 013 degrees 15 minutes west and 013 degrees 39 minutes west and parallels 29 degrees 07 minutes north and 29 degrees 30 minutes north, covering the islets that hold the protected seabird colonies.
- Off Tenerife (cetacean breeding ground): between meridian 017 degrees 22 minutes west and the south coast, between parallels 28 degrees 00 minutes north and 28 degrees 21 minutes north, covering the Teno-Rasca resident pilot whale waters.
- Off Gran Canaria (cetacean breeding ground): between meridian 016 degrees 00 minutes west and the coast, between parallels 27 degrees 44 minutes north and 28 degrees 00 minutes north, covering the Mogan cetacean waters.
- Off La Palma (biosphere reserve): between meridians 017 degrees 35 minutes west and 018 degrees 00 minutes west and parallels 28 degrees 17 minutes north and 29 degrees 00 minutes north.
- Off El Hierro (biosphere reserve): a polygon bounded by the parallel 28 degrees 00 minutes north, the meridians 017 degrees 42 minutes west and 018 degrees 21 minutes west, and the coordinates 27 degrees 48 minutes north 017 degrees 11 minutes west, 27 degrees 23 minutes north 017 degrees 58 minutes west and 27 degrees 36 minutes north 018 degrees 25 minutes west.
The word “should” carries weight. An ATBA adopted under SOLAS V/10 is recommendatory. It is charted, it is IMO-adopted, and a master who ignores it without cause invites scrutiny from the flag state and the port state, but it is not a binding prohibition in the way a no-anchoring area or a mandatory exclusion would be. The threshold is also narrower than a casual reading suggests. The ATBAs do not apply to all large ships; they apply to all tankers, and to other ships over 500 GT only when those ships are carrying oil or dangerous bulk cargo. A 50,000 GT container ship in deep-sea liner trade is not addressed by the ATBAs at all, because its cargo is not oil or dangerous bulk. The measure is engineered to move the persistent-pollutant carriers off the cetacean and seabird waters while leaving general traffic to the through-route and the separation schemes.
APM 4: the CANREP mandatory ship reporting system
The fourth measure is CANREP, the mandatory ship reporting system for the Canary Islands, established under SOLAS Chapter V Regulation 11 and adopted by the Maritime Safety Committee in Resolution MSC.213(81) on 12 May 2006. SOLAS V/11 reserves to the IMO the adoption of mandatory ship reporting systems; a coastal state cannot make reporting compulsory for foreign-flag ships on its own authority, which is why the reporting element required a separate MSC resolution rather than a national decree. CANREP is the measure that gives the PSSA its real-time situational picture.
Reporting is mandatory for a tightly defined set of ships: tankers of 600 deadweight tonnes and above, whether transiting the Canary Islands, sailing to or from Canarian ports, or in inter-island navigation, that carry heavy-grade crude oils with a density greater than 900 kg/m3 at 15C; heavy fuel oils with a density greater than 900 kg/m3 at 15C or a kinematic viscosity greater than 180 mm2/s at 50C; or bitumen, coal tar and their emulsions. These are the persistent, heavy, slow-weathering cargoes that cause the worst and longest-lasting shoreline contamination. The reporting threshold is therefore not gross tonnage of the ship but the nature of its cargo, which aligns CANREP with the ATBA logic of targeting the persistent-pollutant carriers.
The reporting area is bounded by a polygonal line that follows the outer limit of the 12-nautical-mile territorial sea around the archipelago, defined by the same fourteen lettered inflection points A through N as the PSSA polygon. A ship must report on entering the area; immediately after leaving a port, terminal or anchorage inside the area; when deviating from the route to its declared destination; when it has to deviate owing to weather, equipment damage or a change in navigational status; and on finally leaving the area. A ship that merely crosses the boundary again during normal sailing, without entering or finally departing, need not report each crossing.
Reports go to one of two Maritime Rescue Co-ordination Centres run by the Spanish search and rescue authority SASEMAR. Ships entering east of the meridian 015 degrees 30 minutes west notify MRCC Las Palmas; ships entering west of that meridian notify MRCC Tenerife, and the same center is used on departure. Each report begins with the word CANREP and a two-letter abbreviation for the report type (sailing plan, final report or deviation report) and may be sent free of cost by VHF (channels 16 and 70), MF (2182 kHz) or AIS, in the standardized format that conforms to Resolution A.851(20). The report carries the ship’s identity, position, course, speed, ports of call, cargo type with IMO classification if dangerous, defects affecting navigation, persons on board, and for tankers an estimate of bunker quantity where it exceeds 5,000 tonnes. COLREG 1972 as amended applies throughout the area.
The objective of CANREP is to launch search and rescue and anti-pollution action as fast as possible if an emergency is reported, or if a ship that should report does not and cannot be contacted. The resolution is explicit about what CANREP is not. It states that the system exists only for the exchange of information and does not confer additional powers to impose a change in a ship’s operations, that it will be implemented in accordance with UNCLOS, the SOLAS Convention and other relevant international instruments, and that it will not constitute a basis for preventing the passage of a ship in transit. A reporting system gives the coastal state eyes, not a veto.
Operating in the PSSA: what the transit actually requires
For the master of a laden heavy-oil tanker on the north-south corridor, the PSSA changes the passage in three concrete ways. First, the route plan is built to keep the ship clear of the five ATBA boxes. Because the boxes sit off the southern and western coasts where the deep water lies close to land, this generally means holding the through-track in the channels covered by the two separation schemes or well offshore of the avoidance zones, rather than cutting close along the lee of an island to shorten the leg. The diversion cost is modest compared with the Galapagos case, because the schemes lie on the natural through-route and the avoidance boxes are small, but the plan must show the boxes and the intended track around them.
Second, the CANREP report is built into the passage plan as a fixed bridge task. The officer of the watch prepares the CANREP sailing-plan report before the ship crosses the territorial-sea line, selects Las Palmas or Tenerife by the 015 degrees 30 minutes west meridian, and transmits on VHF channel 16 or 70, on 2182 kHz, or by AIS, prefixed CANREP with the two-letter report-type code. A deviation report follows if weather, machinery damage or a change of navigational status forces the ship off its declared route, and a final report closes the transit on departure. The report is free of cost, so the only reason it is ever missed is poor passage planning or a cargo-threshold misjudgment, both of which show up in port-state-control records.
Third, lane discipline under the separation schemes is enforced through COLREG Rule 10 wherever the ship is inside a scheme. A vessel proceeds in the correct lane, joins and leaves at the ends or at as small an angle as practicable, and crosses only at near right angles. For a ship not carrying oil or dangerous bulk, this lane discipline is the whole of the PSSA’s practical effect: the ATBAs and CANREP do not bind it, but the traffic separation schemes and the collision regulations do. That distinction, who is bound by which measure, is the single most useful thing for a bridge team to settle before entering Canarian waters.
Casualty record and the persistent-cargo focus
The vulnerability case in MEPC.134(53) was built on standing risk rather than a single headline spill, which is why the measures target the persistent-cargo carriers so precisely. The resolution’s own figures, roughly 1,500 Gulf-bound or Gulf-origin tankers a year passing the islands and 4 million tonnes of oil a year landed at the Tenerife refinery terminal, describe a continuous exposure: a fleet of heavy-oil tankers passing within sight of cetacean grounds and a tourist coast, in both ballast and laden condition, with routine discharge of oily residues and the ever-present chance of a grounding on the steep volcanic shores. The Gran Canaria animal recovery center’s annual intake of around fifteen beached cetaceans and dozens of oil-damaged turtles quantified the background harm the PSSA was meant to cut.
The cargo categories in the CANREP threshold map directly onto the worst-case spill. Heavy-grade crude above 900 kg/m3, heavy fuel oil above 900 kg/m3 or above 180 mm2/s viscosity, and bitumen and coal tar are the slow-weathering, persistent oils that sink, smother and cling to porous volcanic rock, the materials the resolution describes as difficult to restore once polluted. A clean-products spill evaporates and disperses; a heavy-fuel spill on a basalt and pyroclastic coast persists for seasons. By tying both the CANREP report and the ATBA scope to persistence rather than to ship size alone, the regime concentrates surveillance and avoidance on the ships whose cargo would do lasting damage, and accepts a lighter touch on the larger volume of general and clean-products traffic.
This persistence logic is also why the Las Palmas bunkering hub matters out of proportion to its berth count. Bunker fuel is heavy fuel oil, exactly the persistent category, and a bunkering hub concentrates ship-to-ship transfers, barge movements and laden fuel tankers in one set of waters. The CANREP threshold catches the tankers that feed the hub, and the broader MARPOL Annex I discharge controls and the SOPEP shipboard contingency plan apply to every transfer, so a bunkering casualty triggers an immediate, planned response rather than an improvised one.
Legal mechanism and the limits of enforcement
The PSSA designation in MEPC.134(53) is, by itself, a recognition. It does not create a binding rule of its own. The enforceable obligations come from the SOLAS Chapter V measures in MSC.213(81): the routeing schemes and ATBAs under Regulation 10, and the reporting system under Regulation 11. This split, environmental designation by MEPC and navigational measures by MSC, is the standard IMO architecture for a PSSA whose protection rests on routeing and reporting, and it is the same dual-track structure used for the Galapagos and Wadden Sea PSSAs. The Associated Protective Measures, adopted at MSC 81 in May 2006, took effect under IMO’s standard practice for ships’ routeing and reporting systems, normally six months after adoption, allowing time for chart correction and route-planning updates.
Spain’s enforcement reach is real but bounded. Inside the 12-nautical-mile territorial sea the coastal state has broad jurisdiction, subject to the right of innocent passage under UNCLOS Part II. Beyond the territorial sea, in the exclusive economic zone, coastal-state regulation of vessel-source pollution runs through UNCLOS Article 211, which lets a coastal state apply generally accepted international rules and standards, the IMO measures, but limits unilateral additions to clearly defined areas meeting specified conditions. The IMO adoption of the ATBAs and CANREP is what makes them opposable to foreign-flag ships at all; without the MSC resolution they would be national rules of contested international standing. The recommendatory wording of the ATBAs, the limitation of CANREP to information exchange, and the explicit statement that the reporting system cannot prevent a ship’s passage all reflect the UNCLOS balance between coastal-state protection and freedom of navigation that constrains every PSSA.
That balance is the practical limit of the regime. The Canary Islands PSSA cannot turn the deep-water cetacean grounds into a no-go zone for a foreign-flag tanker in transit. What it can do is route the persistent-pollutant traffic onto defined lanes, steer it off the most sensitive waters, and require the highest-risk tankers to announce themselves so that a casualty triggers an immediate response. Enforcement against a non-compliant ship runs through the flag state, informed by Spain, with possible proceedings under national law, rather than through any direct coastal-state penalty on a ship in transit.
Comparison with the Galapagos and other single-state PSSAs
The Canary Islands PSSA sits naturally alongside the Galapagos PSSA, designated at the same MEPC 53 session in July 2005, and the structural contrast is instructive. Both are volcanic archipelagos of high endemism administered by a single coastal state, both pair an area-to-be-avoided with a reporting system, and both were driven by the threat of oil pollution from passing traffic. They diverge on the strength of the avoidance measure. The Galapagos ATBA is a binding exclusion for ships of 500 GT and above not in trade with the archipelago, reinforced by Ecuadorian domestic law and a deep-water transit route. The Canary Islands ATBAs are recommendatory and cargo-specific, applying only to tankers and to oil or dangerous-bulk carriers over 500 GT, and the protective channeling is done instead by the two traffic separation schemes and CANREP. The difference reflects the traffic: the Canaries carry a far denser and more diverse commercial flow on a major intercontinental corridor, where a blanket exclusion would be neither proportionate nor enforceable.
Against the trilateral Wadden Sea PSSA, the Canary Islands case shows the single-state model in a European setting. The Wadden Sea needed the Common Wadden Sea Secretariat to coordinate three states and a WETREP reporting interface split across national authorities; the Canaries needed only SASEMAR and a two-center split of one national reporting system at the 015 degrees 30 minutes west meridian. Both rely on SOLAS V/11 mandatory reporting as a core APM. The Canary Islands regime is also part of a broader Spanish and European protection mesh: the Macaronesian Sites of Community Importance under the EU Habitats Directive, the national biosphere reserves, the cetacean special areas of conservation, and the Teno-Rasca Whale Heritage Site all overlap the PSSA without being part of it.
Limitations and practitioner notes
The single most common error is to read the ATBAs as a binding no-entry zone for all large ships. They are not. They are recommendatory routeing measures under SOLAS V/10, and they apply only to tankers and to ships over 500 GT carrying oil or dangerous bulk cargo. A laden container ship, a car carrier or a dry-bulk carrier without a dangerous bulk cargo is outside the ATBA scope, and even a ship within scope commits no binding offence by entering, though it exposes itself to flag-state and port-state attention and to liability if a casualty follows. Treat the ATBAs as strong navigational guidance backed by the regulator’s expectation, not as a charted prohibition.
The second pitfall is the CANREP threshold. CANREP is not a general large-ship reporting system. It binds only tankers of 600 deadweight tonnes and above carrying the three categories of heavy, persistent cargo defined in the resolution: heavy-grade crude above 900 kg/m3, heavy fuel oil above 900 kg/m3 or above 180 mm2/s at 50C, or bitumen, coal tar and emulsions. A clean-products tanker carrying gasoil, or a chemical tanker carrying a light non-persistent cargo, is not caught by the mandatory CANREP report even though it may be a substantial ship in the same waters. Voyage planners must check cargo density and viscosity against the thresholds, not just the ship’s tonnage, before deciding whether the report is compulsory.
The third is the two-center split. The reporting MRCC is chosen by the meridian of 015 degrees 30 minutes west at the point of entry: east of it, Las Palmas; west of it, Tenerife. The departure report goes to the same center as the entry report. A ship that enters in the east, calls in the west and departs in the west must still manage the report logic correctly; the most frequent compliance defect in two-center systems is reporting to the wrong authority or failing to close out the report on departure. The report is free of cost, so there is no charge-avoidance reason to skip it.
The fourth is the gap between the merchant measures and the cetacean noise problem. CANREP and the ATBAs address ship strike and pollution from the heavy-oil traffic, but the acute acoustic threat to beaked whales documented in the archipelago came from naval sonar, which Spain addressed through a national naval-exercise moratorium, not through the IMO measures. The PSSA does not regulate underwater radiated noise from merchant ships; IMO guidance on that is recommendatory and separate. A practitioner should not assume the PSSA solves the noise question.
The fifth is the boundary between the IMO measures and Spanish national law. The high-speed inter-island ferries, the Las Palmas bunkering operations, anchoring restrictions, and the cetacean-watching rules are governed by Spanish and EU instruments that sit on top of the PSSA. A vessel operating in Canarian waters must comply with both layers, and the national rules are in places stricter than the IMO floor. The IMO PSSA file is the international baseline, not the whole compliance picture.
The sixth is currency. The designation rests on Resolution MEPC.134(53) of 2005 and the APMs on MSC.213(81) of 2006; the PSSA Guidelines have since been consolidated into A.982(24) and amended by MEPC.267(68), and chart editions, MRCC contact details and the Spanish national overlay are revised periodically. Always work from the current edition of Spanish Navy chart 209 and the current SASEMAR notices, not the 2005 figures reproduced for reference here.
See also
- Particularly Sensitive Sea Areas: IMO PSSA Guide
- Particularly Sensitive Sea Area: Galapagos Archipelago
- Particularly Sensitive Sea Area: Wadden Sea
- SOLAS Convention
- SOLAS Chapter V safety of navigation
- MARPOL Convention
- MARPOL Annex I oil pollution prevention
- MARPOL Annex I Regulation 37 SOPEP
- CPA and TCPA calculator
- Under-keel clearance calculator
- Calculator catalogue