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“Dear migrants, before saying anything else to you, I want to bow before your dignity,” Pope Leo XIV said Thursday morning at the port of Arguineguín on the island of Gran Canaria. “You are not just numbers or files. You are people who have left behind families and homes. You have dreams that no one has the right to despise.”

Relief workers call this pier the “dock of shame.” In 2020, more than 2,600 men, women, and children slept here in the open — six times the dock’s capacity — after crossing the Atlantic from West Africa in wooden cayucos and rubber dinghies.

No pope had ever made an apostolic journey to the Canary Islands. Pope Francis told reporters in September 2024 that he wanted to come “because there are situations with migrants arriving by sea,” and the Diocese of Canarias held a signed letter confirming his intention. He died before he could make the trip. On Thursday, his successor finished it for him.

The pope spent the first part of the morning listening. Here’s what he heard.