Port Tarragona welcomes the first cruise liner of the season

The Port expects to receive more passenger vessels during the autumn

The liner docked at the Llevant Wharf as the Balears Wharf has yet to be inaugurated

The Balears Wharf is ready to supply electricity to cruise ships

This morning, September 27, at approximately 8 am, the first cruise liner of the 2021 season docked at the Port of Tarragona’s Llevant Wharf. The Port organised a welcoming event in which its president, Josep M Cruset, presented a metope to the captain of the vessel "Bolette".

The cruise ship docked on the Llevant Wharf belongs to the Fred Olsen Cruise Line, a Norwegian company based in the United Kingdom. It arrived from Cádiz and will set sail for Castellón at 10 pm tonight. The vessel is 237.98 metres long with a gross tonnage of 62,735, a capacity of 1,338 passengers and a marked British line with the qualities of a traditional medium-sized cruise liner.

Bolette is the first cruise ship to dock in the Port since the Covid-19 pandemic brought the worldwide cruise sector to a halt. The Port president, Josep M. Cruset, stressed "that despite this being a year without cruise activity around the world, the sector has worked very hard to programme stopovers while applying the necessary health and safety measures”. Mr Cruset also described the arrival of the liner "as a hugely symbolic event for the Port, for our region’s tourism sector and for a return to normalcy in 2022".

Cruise season

The arrival of the Bolette could be just the beginning, as the Port of Tarragona is working on further bookings for this autumn. It is currently expecting the arrival of five cruise vessels during October and another in November. However, the Port clarifies that "these are anticipated arrivals, not confirmations".

From an operational point of view, the Port of Tarragona has been constantly prepared, both in 2020 and throughout 2021, for the resumption of cruises, as well as in terms of logistics and the application of Covid-19 health measures. The Port was also pioneering in organising a countrywide webinar in June 2020 with the various actors in the sector to address how to deal with cruise activity in the light of the Covid-19 prevention measures in force at the time.

2019 and 2020 seasons

The 2019 season, the last before the Covid-19 pandemic, saw a record number of 128,000 passengers pass through the Port of Tarragona. In the final balance, it was described as the best cruise season since the start of the project. This figure was achieved by increasing the number of vessel calls to 63 and the arrival of larger liners with higher passenger capacities. In addition to the good quantitative results, the Rovira i Virgili University monitoring survey recorded an overall cruise passenger satisfaction rating for the Tarragona-Costa Daurada destination of “8.9 out of 10, bordering on excellent”.