JUST five nautical miles of turquoise sea separate Turkey from the tourist town of Molyvos, on the Greek island of Lesbos. But the boat got stuck halfway across, says 24-year-old Mohammed Mahmoud. He and a half-dozen university friends fled their bombed-out home town of Aleppo, Syria a month earlier, making their way across Turkey. In Izmir they each paid €1,000 ($1,100) to smugglers who put them on a night bus with blacked-out windows, then ordered them out on a desolate hillside. They scrambled down to the water, young women clutching small children, and into a rubber dinghy, 54 in a boat made for 20. In mid-voyage the outboard motor died, says Mr Mahmoud: “We tried to fix it, but it fell off and sank.”

“He’s lying,” says Rafail Tsamouras, chief petty officer on the Hellenic Coast Guard patrol boat that picked the migrants up. The smugglers know the system, he says, and many tell the migrants to dump their motors once they enter Greek waters. The coast guard is required to rescue and transport them to the island’s migrant processing camps. Migrants who reach shore on their own must often walk 60km to the camps outside Mytilene, Lesbos’s capital.

This summer, ten or more such boats have arrived on Lesbos every day. Greece has replaced Italy as the main route for migrants fleeing the Middle East. Over 75,000 came in the first half of this year, seven times more than 2014. Most are Syrian, and most come to Lesbos. In the week to July 17th some 8,500 landed on an island with a population of 86,000. At Moria, the main migrant camp, they are fingerprinted, receive papers, and continue to Athens. But police have just two of the fingerprinting machines provided by Frontex, the European Union border agency, and can register at most 500 people per day. A backlog of 1,500 migrants has built up at Moria. In March the city opened another camp, called Kara Tepe, to cope with the overflow.

The municipality has no legal authority to spend money on migrants, but it does so anyway. Spyros Galenos, mayor of Mytilene, says he is “keeping up the fight”: the island cannot afford wandering bands of refugees scaring tourists. It must find ways to house them and move them on to Athens. At Kara Tepe, rubbish blows between the tents and toilets have clogged up. The city had to replace a fuse-box after migrants cracked it open to recharge their phones. Six coast-guard officers provide security for 3,500 or more migrants. They sometimes spill out towards the neighbouring supermarket, blocking the main road in the hope of catching a ride. The migrants do not want to stay in Greece. They are heading for Germany or other parts of Europe’s wealthy core. Europe has done little to help Lesbos, apart from occasional Frontex boat and helicopter patrols. Change may be on the way: EU countries have just agreed to distribute 32,256 asylum applicants between them (see ). Still, that many come here in a month. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees and charities like Doctors Without Borders do what they can.