1,500 weapons seized in the Canary Islands are melted and recycled into everyday objects
The Guardia Civil has destroyed more than 1,500 weapons in the Canary Islands this month, ensuring they can never fall into the wrong hands. The firearms, collected from across the province of Las Palmas (Gran Canaria, Lanzarote, Fuerteventura), were melted down and will be recycled into everyday items.
The operation was carried out by the Weapons and Explosives Intervention Unit of the Las Palmas Command, in collaboration with the Guardia Civil’s Mobile Material Service and its Cádiz and Seville commands.
Officials explained that the initiative complies with current Spanish firearms regulations and is designed to permanently remove weapons from circulation, increasing public safety.
The seized weapons, which included a large number of shotguns as well as rifles, pistols, revolvers, air guns, spearguns, and knives, were transported to a steel plant on the Spanish mainland. There, they were melted down, with the recovered steel set to be repurposed for manufacturing everyday products, transforming items once designed to cause harm into tools for daily life.
Not all the weapons came from crime: some were handed in voluntarily by their owners for destruction, others were linked to judicial or administrative rulings, and many were stored beyond the legal one-year deposit limit. Prohibited weapons, such as those without serial numbers or official markings, were also included.
This action is part of the Guardia Civil’s Comprehensive Firearms Control Plan (PICAF), which supports both Spanish law and United Nations directives on arms control. The strategy seeks to prevent serious risks such as illegal trafficking, the reactivation of decommissioned weapons, the conversion of alarm or air guns into real firearms, and even the artisanal manufacture of improvised weapons.
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