Collboni wants to eliminate large cruise ships in Barcelona in the coming years

BarcelonaMore pressure on cruise ships that do not have Barcelona as their home port and only make a stopover. The mayor of the Catalan capital, Jaume Collboni, announced this Wednesday that his objective is that in the coming years this type of offering does not exist in the city and that only vessels that have the Catalan capital as their home port dock in the Port of Barcelona. In an interview with Betevé, he advocated for "reducing cruise stopovers to zero" in the coming years. "We have to start making brave and very clear decisions in this regard," he said.

For the moment, Collboni explained that he will propose in the next fiscal ordinances to maximize the tourist surcharge for passengers of this type of vessel. This means that transit cruisers should pay up to 14 euros per person per night, adding the six euros of tourist tax they have to pay plus the eight that Barcelona can charge as a maximum surcharge. The mayor, however, has gone further and assured that he will also ask the Generalitat to eliminate the surcharge cap in order to further increase the tax for this type of vessel.

The mayor has justified this policy by the high impact that this type of cruise has on the city, as they "make very intensive use of public space, especially in districts such as Ciutat Vella or Eixample" without staying overnight in the city's accommodations —they spend the night on the ship— nor practically consuming.

Collboni's announcement comes after the City Council reached an agreement with the Port practically a year ago to reduce the cruise terminals from the current seven to only five by 2030. A measure that, according to the council's calculations, means that in five years the maximum capacity of the port, if all terminals were operating at full capacity, would be 31,000 cruise passengers at the same time, while without the reduction of terminals, this figure would grow to 37,000.

Now the mayor's new commitment to eliminate transit cruises foreshadows a new dispute with the Port. Last July, the president of the infrastructure, José Alberto Carbonell, admitted that the reduction of terminals should help reduce the percentage of cruises that only make very short stays in the city. He warned, however, that "Barcelona is not Miami" and that, therefore, it cannot aspire to 100% home port cruises, which is what Collboni is now proposing.

The mayor has framed the offensive against cruise ships in the commitment that "tourism should be at the service of the city and not the city at the service of tourism", and that this implies "setting limits and making decisions". "Barcelona is making decisions that no one else is making," boasted Collboni, who included among these measures the announcement of eliminating all tourist apartments in the city by the year 2028.