On Saturday, she stressed that the risk of contagion for the general population was low. “We believe that alarmism, misinformation and confusion are contrary to the basic principles of preserving public health.”

Security measures in the port, an industrial facility in the south of Tenerife, increased notably on Saturday. Spain’s military police and disaster response teams have both set up large reception tents and access to the waterfront is restricted.

Spanish nationals leaving the ship will be flown to Madrid, where they face a mandatory quarantine in the Gomez Ulla military hospital. Complete isolation would be gruelling – the virus has an incubation period of up to nine weeks – and it is not clear how long people in Spain or elsewhere will be quarantined.

The head of the World Health Organization (WHO) Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, now in Tenerife to oversee the disembarking, has praised the authorities for their “solid and effective response” to this outbreak.

It has been linked to a landfill site in the southernmost tip of Argentina, popular with birdwatchers. The virus is carried there by rodents, and it’s rare for it to pass between people, but three cruise passengers have died.

The WHO boss has urged nervous Spaniards to trust those in charge of the evacuation.

“Your concern is legitimate, because of the experience of Covid: that trauma is still in our minds,” he acknowledged. But he added that the risk of wider contagion now was low “because of how the virus works, and because of how the Spanish government has prepared to avoid any problem”.

There was some anger here when people learned the Hondius was being diverted to their island.

On Friday, a group of port workers gathered outside the local parliament in noisy protest, concerned that safety measures were not strong enough.

Then very late last night, all the carefully laid plans were briefly thrown into chaos when the president of the Canary Islands, Fernando Clavijo, said he would refuse to permit the ship into port as the disembarkation could not be done in a day. The central government in Madrid had to intervene.

Clavijo then claimed on TV that a rat carrying the hantavirus might “get off the ship in the middle of the night and endanger the people of the Canary Islands”. The health secretary had to come out and insist that such a scenario was “not a risk”.

In general, people on the island seem reassured that the risk is low.

“The virus is dangerous, of course. But they say you need to have very close contact to get it,” a woman named Jennifer told me, out walking with her child in Tenerife’s capital Santa Cruz.

“If we’re careful, we hope it’s not too serious.”

Not everyone will disembark in Tenerife from the Hondius: some 30 crew members will stay on board to take the cruise ship back to the Netherlands. But for most, there is at last an end in sight to weeks of fear and uncertainty at sea.

Now come the long weeks of quarantine.